Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
The permanent population increase is totally reasonable and within historical norms, why would you want to curtail that? If we did, we'd need to be OK with one or more of the following happening:
1) Higher taxes
2) Bigger deficits
3) Reduction in pension, OAS, healthcare, etc.
Given our demographics, we need about 500K new primary residents through immigration each year to maintain our historical rate of labor force growth and that's roughly what the current targets are. Without that, then we just have an aging population that relies on a shrinking workforce to fund everything.
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I wonder what a long term flattening of the demographic pyramid would look like. Say over the next 80 years we set immigration targets to create a demo graphic square and limit total Canadian population to 100 million. At some point as the world becomes more well off and educated birth rates drop off so eventually immigration won’t be a solution.
So a prudent country should be preparing for that over a long period of time rather than just kicking the can down the road. You will definitely need to increase CPP contributions (or perhaps just maintain as currently we are still repaying past under contributions). Health care costs go up dramatically and the percentage of costs from OAS go up too.
Buts it’s a reality that is coming within our children’s lifetimes.