Thank you, Sir.
First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me here today, because in my practice I act for both employers and employees and so I see this issue from both sides of the table. I believe that navigating the transition to an older workforce will become the dominant workplace issue in Canada over at least the next couple of decades. How successful that transition is will have a direct impact on Canada's economic prosperity, as well as our social welfare system.
With that in mind, it's critical that we identify the means and manner in which we can successfully transition to an older workforce and encourage workers to work beyond age 65. In order to do that, this really has to become a national economic priority.
First, I want to point out that the transition from the status quo to a successful older workforce really does face some critical barriers. This is not going to be an easy challenge. One of those, obviously, is the pressure on employers to cut costs by laying off older workers. The other that's been identified already is age-related performance issues—how those are accommodated in a workplace—such as adapting to new technologies, lower energy levels, health and wellness issues, and special needs.
One that I find is often neglected but which I commonly see in my practice is the aspirations of younger workers: “Get out of the way. I want your job.” That will require some education and public advocacy to really bridge the gap. We also have an unparalleled mentoring opportunity here for knowledge transfer between older and younger workers that needs to be cultivated.
Younger workers, quite candidly, have to be brought onboard with the concept that people are going to be working past age 65. We have to embrace this in Canadian society so that people's expectation is that they're going to retire later and that our society and our legislation are designed to encourage that.
One thing I want to address before I get into recommendations is some statistics. I think they can often be skewed and misunderstood. One in particular that's highly relevant to this issue is the average age of retirement, which has stayed relatively static since 2004, at age 62. In my submission, there's too much emphasis put on that particular statistic because it's skewed by the age structure of our population. So I'd like to draw your attention to a few other statistics that I've found in my research preparing for today, which I thought were particularly poignant.
A 50-year-old worker in 2008 is expected to stay in the labour force for approximately three and one-half years longer than he or she would have in the mid-1990s. Retirement has been delayed. I'm referring to labour force survey data for my statistics. What this represents to me is that older workers have been consistently delaying their retirement since the 1990s. For example, in 2008, an employed 50-year-old had an expected additional 16 years of work. As I mentioned, that's roughly three and one-half years longer than they would have had in the nineties.
I think the statistic for early retirement has also been somewhat skewed by the marked trend in the late eighties and early nineties toward early retirement, prompted by high public sector deficits. Since the 1990s, though, that trend has changed significantly.
Another interesting fact is the employment rate of individuals aged 55 and over. Between 1997 and 2010 that rate went from 30.5% to 39.4% for men and it's nearly doubled for women. Again, from 1997 to 2010, 15.8% of the 55 and over crowd were in the workforce. Now it's 28.6% for women.
So these data are really at odds with the average retiring age having stayed at 62 consistently since 2004. They suggest to me, in fact, that people are extending their retirement age.
The other aspect that is relevant is the aging population and the fact that our birth rates are down significantly. There's been a long-term decline in children per woman, fluctuating around 1.5 since 2000 compared with 3.9 children per woman in the second half of the 1950s.
So the proportion of older workers has increased significantly and will continue to do so over the next quarter century. The proportion of children, young adults, and middle-aged adults will continue to decline.
How do we address this in a way that's going to make a meaningful impact?
First of all, my recommendation would be—and I believe part of that initiative has begun already in today's room—to establish a task force and conduct public, intergovernmental, and employer consultation with a view to recommending proactive changes in public policy, workplace legislation, and working conditions to make retiring at 65 the exception rather than the norm.
There should be broader consultation to convince corporate Canada, industry, professional associations, and prominent business leaders to take a proactive approach and embrace the idea of an older workforce. This will involve creating economic incentives, including tax breaks as well as grant programs, to encourage this type of thing. I'll get into more detail on that in a moment.
As well, there should be consultation with the human resource community to drive the creation of supports to meet the special needs of older workers and create workplace conditions conducive to the wellbeing of older employees.
Finally, there should be advocacy campaigns involving advertising, earned media, and grassroots advocacy to convince older workers to stay on the job.
What really needs to be done here is to instill an understanding in our population that we have a public duty to embrace the older worker and to create a situation where their knowledge will be utilized to their advantage. That leads me to what I believe to be a critical component to this strategy, and that's taking advantage of this unparalleled mentoring opportunity I mentioned earlier. How do we do this? We create incentives to business to establish formal information-sharing forums, possibly by offering grants or tax incentives for those workplaces that hit pre-established participation targets.
Establish incentives for older workers to become mentors. For example, why not give a tax break to boomers who participate in a workplace mentoring program? This is how we're going to encourage the knowledge transfer. Once that gap has been bridged, I think we'll find a lot of the workplace conflict that arises from the generation gap dissipating and becoming more of a productive interchange between the parties.
At the risk of running over my time, I would say in summary that we have to take a multidisciplinary approach to this. Ultimately, like many things in the capitalist world, we also have to recognize that economic incentives are going to drive a fundamental change in how society approaches these things.
Those are my comments.
