Why Immigration Will Never Be a Fix for Canada’s Aging Population

Senior citizens make their way down a street in Peterborough, Ont., in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

Commentary

Canada is in the midst of an overdue national debate on immigration levels. We should take this moment to scrutinize some long-overlooked flaws in one of the most common arguments for high immigration: our aging population.

On its face, the aging population argument makes sense. Because of high life expectancy and low fertility rates, the proportion of the population made up of older age cohorts is growing. An influx of young newcomers could theoretically reverse this trend.

Like many quick policy fixes, this idea breaks down upon closer inspection.

In a 2003 paper, Canadian sociologist and demographer Roderic Beaujot states that “It is impossible to use immigration to prevent an increase in the population aged 65 and over as a ratio to the population aged 20-64.”

At the time of the paper’s publication, Canada’s annual immigration rate was roughly 225,000. Beaujot references the extraordinary finding that doubling this rate to 450,000 from 2001 to 2051 would have had almost no effect on the country’s age structure, noting that “an extra 225,000 immigrants per year for 50 years reduces the median age by 2.3 years.”

In fact, even if Canada had accepted zero newcomers from 1951 to 2001, our median age would have been just 0.8 years older as a result.

In 2006, the C.D. Howe Institute published a report on this same issue titled “No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young.” The conclusion was blunt: “Whatever the benefits of immigration to Canada’s economy and society, and to immigrants themselves, immigration cannot relieve Canada of the challenges of an aging population.”

The report runs through different simulations, ultimately finding that “no conceivable amount of immigration with an age profile such as Canada currently experiences can significantly affect the coming shift in the ratio of older to working-age Canadians.”

The report found that a major weakness of the aging population argument is that Canada accepts immigrants from a broad range of ages. This continues to be the case 19 years after its release—Ottawa intends to accept 10,000 sponsorships for parents and grandparents of newcomers this year.

According to the report, if Canada continued to accept a variety of older and younger newcomers, the old-age dependency ratio could theoretically be stabilized—but only if immigration reached 2.6 million per year by 2020, and 7 million per year by 2050!

The report found that, even in a bizarre scenario in which Canada decided to only accept immigrants aged 20-24, we would still need “an average of 1.2 million 20- to 24-year-olds annually” from 2012 to 2030 just to stabilize the old-age dependency ratio by 2050.

The authors dryly note that “resident young people would notice the impact” of such a dramatic inflow, “particularly through intensified competition in the job market.”

Fast forward to 2025, and research still finds little support for using immigration as a tool to fix aging. A study published in February by the Migration Policy Institute explores a variety of different high-immigration and low-immigration scenarios, concluding that “even under the highest of these immigration rates, the old-age dependency ratio would still rise.”

The study found the only way to mitigate the fact that immigrants “age and eventually retire along with their native-born peers” would be the self-evidently absurd option of “continuously increasing the scale of immigration on an indefinite basis.”

One other way that immigration could theoretically offset aging would be if immigrants boosted Canada’s fertility rate. In reality, the effect of immigration on fertility is insignificant.

A 2013 study published in the University of Bonn’s Institute of Labor Economics found that immigrant women in Canada have lower fertility rates than their native-born counterparts for the first five years after arrival—especially newcomers from Asian countries like China. Over a longer period, population research indicates that immigrant fertility rates tend to converge with those of the Canadian-born as they acculturate.

If our goal is a stable population with a healthy old-age dependency ratio, the most direct and efficient option would be to raise Canada’s domestic fertility rate to 2.1 (the rate at which a population replaces itself).

In 2023, our fertility rate fell to 1.26, a new record low. Now that our national fertility rate is under 1.3, we hold the dubious distinction of being in the “lowest-low” fertility countries—a club whose membership also includes South Korea, Spain, Italy, and Japan.

A report published in March by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute points out that Canada’s low fertility rates are not principally the result of lifestyle choices. Survey data shows that, on average, Canadian women still “aspire to have two or more children.”

The report argues that Canada should deploy a range of pro-natal economic measures to ease financial hardships associated with having kids, including slashing income tax and dramatically boosting per-child tax deductions. On the cultural side, the report suggests the government leverage its influence over the arts by asking content producers to “make more content portraying marriage and family life in a positive light.”

Canada’s current strategy of using high immigration to stall aging is not grounded in evidence. We need a new approach. Gradually nudging fertility rates back towards replacement level will take decades, but it is a worthwhile policy that moves us closer to the valuable goal of a stable population with a healthy mix of young and old.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.