Statistics Canada Reports II

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Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Young people haven't worked enough (unless they need generational wealth) to be able to retire. People still need to work, they just need to work less across their life.

Across society participation rates have been slowly declining though - which means less and less working-age people are choosing to work. This, as you allude to, is likely mostly due to increasing amounts of early retirements where more and more people exit the workforce earlier in life when they are still considered "working age", i.e. before 65. This is actually an interesting phenomenon, as labour participation rates consistently increased up until around the Great Recession as more women entered the workforce. That process has now largely matured however, and male participation rates have been slowly declining for decades.





Of course even with a declining participation rate, 65% of working age people are still working.

Even those who do choose to work are generally working less as well. Men have seen a decline of average hours worked from about 42 hours in 1976 to 37 hours in 2024, and total hours worked across both genders has declined from about 39 hours to 37 hours since 1990.



And on top of all this - we have increasing percentages of the population which are seniors.



The increasing rate of seniors is a big part of it - but people are simply working less than they used to.

As a whole - those over 65 are the largest single driver of "unproductive time" in Canadian society - 19.4% of Canadians are over the age of 65 today compared to just 13.8% in 1990. This represents a "drag" of 5.1% in overall labour productivity once you adjust for the population of children declining from 20.9% in 1990 to 20.5% 2025.

But you also have lower labour participation rates for those who are working age - 65.1% of that population participates in 2025 compared to 67.1% in 1990 - a drag of about 3%. AND you have reduced working hours. In 1990, the average employee worked 39.4 hours a week. Today, it is 37.2 hours. This is about a 4% drag on total productivity.

So overall, yes, the increased population of seniors needs those who are working to work about 5% more to earn the same amount as a society. But we as a society also work about 7% less than we did 35 years ago as well. So our society as a whole puts about 11% less labour out than we did in 1990.

That's incredibly misleading. In particular, the idea that people are working less today than they did 50 years ago. That's utter nonsense.

People today work much more, they just don't do it at their main workplace. They have to. People can't afford to "just" have a job. You need to work two jobs just to afford rent and groceries. That's not because they wouldn't like to work at one job, it's because that one job pays them peanuts. Contrast that with 1976 where you could still support a family, a home, a car and an annual vacation while also having something left over to put in the bank. Only those nearing the end of their careers can afford that lifestyle today. The rest of us work our 40 hours a week and then pick up whatever else we can any way we can.