Vancouver Sun Thursday, April 12, 2001High immigration won't solve the problems facing an aging Canada
by Martin Collacott, Special to the Sun
The Vancouver Sun published an article recently that stated Canada must dramatically boost immigration to counter the social and economic impact of an aging population, according to a new report by Statistics Canada.
The Statistics Canada study, in fact, said only that, because of low fertility levels, the population would start to decline in several decades if not offset by high immigration. It said nothing about immigration helping to solve the social and economic impact of aging, as stated in The Sun's report.
Even at that, the wording of the study was misleading in that it did not indicate what was meant by high immigration. Most studies on the subject suggest that considerably lower levels of net immigration than at present would be sufficient to maintain reasonable population levels.
The distinction between immigration helping to solve the problem of a declining population and immigration providing a solution to the problems of an aging population and an worsening dependency ratio (i.e., fewer workers per retirees) is an important one, since efforts are made from time to time to justify high immigration levels by claiming that they are necessary to offset the aging and dependency problems.
The fact is that there is an abundance of evidence that immigration cannot provide a solution.
The most comprehensive examination of these issues to date was presented in the demographic review issued by the department of health and welfare in 1989, which showed that increased immigration would have very little impact on population aging unless undertaken on a truly massive scale.
The department of citizenship and immigration confirmed this conclusion in a paper on immigration and Canadian demographics in 1998 and, in the same year, Statistics Canada, in its annual report on the demographic situation in Canada, stated that "immigration is a dangerous method of curbing aging and immigration cannot erase the dilemma of growing old, which the entire population must face."
The fundamental flaw in the "immigration can solve the population aging" problem was spelled out in detail last year in a United Nations' study, which showed that the number of immigrants needed to maintain current age levels would be overwhelming.
While Canada was not one of the countries covered in the study, the United States -- with an age profile very close to ours -- was included. In the case of the U.S., enough immigrants would have to be brought in to quadruple the population in the coming 50 years. The problem does not even end there, however.
Since immigrants take on the same aging and family-size characteristics as other North Americans after a generation or two, the population would continue to find itself aging and it would again be necessary to quadruple the population in the following 50 years. In the case of Canada, this would mean we would have to have almost half a billion people on our soil by the end of the century.
This is not to say that the problems associated with an aging population do not have to be addressed by one means or another. What is clear is that immigration does not provide a solution.
Despite this, the minister of immigration and various immigration advocacy groups continue to use demographic arguments in an effort to justify high immigration levels.
A Vancouver resident, Martin Collacott is a former Canadian ambassador in Asia and the Middle East and has written extensively on immigration and refugee issues.