Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
There are lot more industries in the country than construction. The point is, we need to maintain a sustainable ratio between working-age people and retired people, or else the whole thing just breaks down.
Ultimately, current seniors didn't pay near enough into the system to fund the services they expect. When there was a favorable demographic makeup, "pay as you go" made a lot of sense because there were far, far more working age people than retirees, but that's not the case anymore. So things like universal healthcare, CPP, OAS, etc. simply can't work without one of three things happening (or a combo of them):
1) Reduction in services (i.e. OAS cuts, poorer healthcare, etc.);
2) Tax/fee increases (which are an inevitability if you allow the labor force to shrink while expecting them to pay for the same level of services for an aging society); or,
3) Enough immigration to keep the labor force growing at its historical rate of about 1.3% a year. In the current context where there are 2 people retiring for every 1 teenager entering the workforce, that translates to about 500K new permanent residents a year, which is the current government's target.
Of the three, immigration should be by far the most palatable solution, which is why all the major parties seem to agree on it. But that doesn't stop people from blaming immigration for the country's problems and treating it as a partisan issue.
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I see your point, however, with our unusual situation of helping the Ukrainian and Afghanistan people, along with the usual immigrants, combined with the large number of foreign students and those we don't even know are here, we are ending up with increasing our population by closer to one million people.