You can’t fight demographics.
As the election campaign generates pledges from all parties, there is one factor facing all of them in the eye…you can promise all the house construction you want but if you don’t have people to actually build those houses, you’ll come up short.
An assessment of the labor market from the Conference Board puts it quite starkly in forecasting labor shortages for the next five years in the wake of cutbacks on immigration flows.
They note the share of workers over the age of 55 in our workforce has doubled in the last two decades, rising from 10-percent at the turn of the century to 21-percent today.
Basically, one-fifth of the workforce is heading to retirement and we need more, not fewer newcomers to fill the gap.
We were seeing improvements in that ratio in the past five years as immigration flows increased and more people in this age category retired but now that Ottawa is reducing immigration targets, the problem will get worse again. And it will be especially notable in construction.
