Parent Care: The Latest, Greatest Challenge for Baby Boomers

An address by John Wright, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs, Ipsos-Reid to the Empire Club of Canada, in Toronto on May 8th, 2003.

09.05.03

Millions of Canadians are now faced with a new challenge, for which they're mostly unprepared: caring for and their elderly parents or other loved ones. The resulting pressures will impact how Boomers live and work over the next two decades and there is a need to start talking about it today. The following is an address by John Wright, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs, Ipsos-Reid to the Empire Club of Canada - one of Canada's most venerable speaking platforms celebrating their 100th year-- in Toronto on May 8th, 2003.

Madame President, distinguished head table guests, members of The Empire Club, ladies and gentlemen...I stand here in the footsteps of Dr. Angus Reid, our founder, who addressed this body in 1991.

While our company name today is well known across this country, it wasn't always the case. In fact, Angus's speech that dealt with the Constitution, Quebec separatism and the Quebec Referendum was actually the very first time he appeared in Toronto, and arguably to the nation, on a dais that would propel his remarks so extensively into the public domain.

That speech was commented on far and wide and signaled not only the insights of one of Canada's most renowned public opinion thinkers that would soon evolve into the renown that he justifiably bears today, but also was the prologue of one of Canada's most defining moments in the twentieth century.

My presentation today deals with "Parent Care: The Latest, Greatest Challenge for Baby Boomers". While being here marks another landmark for our company, on the surface, parent care may not sound as important as the nation's constitution. But I have learned never to underestimate the power of social trends in changing the very backbone of our country. And I believe that parent care is one of those issues.

This address today is a prologue for what will play out over the course of the next two decades and will have such an impact on our society, its institutions, its health care dimensions and literally millions of Canadian families that it will change the way we think about ourselves - and act with each other - forever.

David Foot's seminal work, Boom, Bust & Echo, which outlined the impact of a growing and aging population in Canada, is upon us as a nation. Indeed, our national grey boom will affect all of the touchstones that we have - advertising, consumer goods and services, tourism and travel, accommodations and housing, and health care in the years to come. Even this past weekend, Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Denis Coderre, pointed out that over the next five years Canada will need at least one million more skilled workers, drawn mainly through immigration, not only to keep up with our pace of growth but particularly to replenish the places left by those in the workforce who are retiring.

Given this, it should also be no surprise that the Ontario Government last week announced its intention to rid barriers of mandatory retirement for those over the age of 65 in the province. The workplace, employers, benefit plans for employees - these will all be predictably affected over the next number of years as 15 per cent of our current workforce will be within 10 years of retirement by the end of this decade. Not to be subtle, boomers who are now between 37 and 55 years old currently make up 47 per cent of the workforce and in 10 years, half of them will be over 55.

Today in this country, there are more people over the age of 55 than under age 15. Two and a half million Canadians are currently between 60 and 69. 2.7 million Canadians are currently over 70 and when you comprise these two groups, it makes up 5,250,000 adults or 22 per cent of the adult Canadian population. Well over two out of you at every table here today.

Finally, by 2006, three million Canadians will be over 70 and in 2011; one million will be over 80.

Those are a lot of numbers to digest in terms of demographics. But they underscore that in a country where we're living longer and where the boomer bulge is leaving a deep wake behind it, it is about to have an enormous impact on our health care system and will challenge our long-term care plans. And those plans are on the cusp of an explosion - ranging from long-term care insurance and home-care services, to new public and private care and housing facilities to name a few. Even health care workers will face dwindling ranks as upwards of 25 per cent of physicians indicate they, themselves, will want to retire in the next decade. Get this - more SARS, more West Nile - and fewer health care workers to combat them. Not a pretty picture.

And we will have choices to make - public funding, role playing for private and public sectors are but the tip of the... well, the tipping point for our society writ large. But the impact will likely be felt most for families as they cope with not only the social and financial assistance that might be required to address elder-care issues, but also the complex feelings that can often overwhelm individuals in terms of comfort and caring for their loved ones.

It is to this issue and this issue alone that I want to confine my remarks today.

Because as you can tell, this is simply too large an issue to identify the tangle of cause and effect that Canadians will likely have to deal with over the next decade or more.

But what we can start with is what Canadians believe on some of these issues drawn from polling done two weeks ago by Ipsos-Reid for this event today and over the last couple of months for our clients RBC Financial, The Alzheimer Society of Canada and Aventis Pharma, all of which have been publicly released.

As of two weeks ago, 73 per cent of adult Canadians told us that they have living parents or in-laws.