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Increasing immigration 'a mistake' |
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Canada would be foolish to increase immigration levels right now, insists one of the country's leading demographers.
David Foot, co-author of the best-selling book Boom, Bust & Echo,
said it is wrong to invite immigrants in to find work just as Canadian
baby boomers' children are entering the job market. These young
Canadians will be more than sufficient to meet job demands for next 10
years, he told a conference of continuing care workers in Edmonton.
Foot, who calls the children of the baby boomers the "echo generation" says many of them are now graduating from school in provinces such as Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
"If you raise immigration levels now, you're asking the new immigrants to come in and compete with the children of the boomers," Foot said.
"That's not fair to the new immigrants and that's not fair to the children of the boomers. I think we should have a policy of creating jobs for the young Canadians who are here."
Foot said that while it may have been demographically appropriate to raise immigration levels over the past decade as labour-force growth slowed -- a reflection of the pill-induced birth dearth of the late 1960s and 1970s -- it is not good demographic policy today.
The children of the boomers -- the so-called echo boom born over the 1980s and early 1990s -- are now starting to enter the labour force he said. Moreover, their boomer parents are not about to retire en masse to make room for them. The peak of the baby boom, born around 1960, is currently aged 45 and will not be retiring for at least another 15 to 20 years, Foot added.
Based on demographics, Foot said he would maintain the existing level of immigration to Canada until 2015, a time when fewer people will be in their 20s.
The newly elected Conservative government has yet to definitively spell out its stance on increasing immigration numbers, something that had been promised by the Liberals under Paul Martin. The former prime minister had announced that it would increase the number of immigrants coming to Canada by 40 per cent within five years. That would bring a total of about 328,000 new permanent residents into the country every year.
Foot, a British-born immigrant who was raised in Australia, said companies need to learn lessons from professional sports and take steps such as offering five-year contracts with agreed severance packages and signing bonuses.
In a decade, once a slimmer pool of young people returns, Foot said he will expect to give different advice.
"If you're asking me 10 years from now, I'd probably be all for increased immigration," Foot said. "But we need to employ these children of the boomers, this echo generation over the next 10 years. That should be our priority."
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Newsfile 