Boom Bust Echo

The keynote speaker was impressive, a Dr Foot who wrote “Boom, Bust & Echo” many years ago. He related the study of people in groups of ages and how it will affect our society in the future. Demographics can; shape how we grow, how we think and act as a society. We can use this information in government to help us make our decisions. Low school enrollment, difficulty in getting workers, cost of health care going up; these were all predicted some time ago. Ontario government had asked him what they should do about their schools if they needed to build more and improve them. Mr. Foot said not bother you will not have the kids to fill them. No, they didn’t listen they built more and bigger school only to find there was no children to fill them. If you want to attract young families to your area (other than giving them employment) providing accessible child care, is a big attraction to those with children.
The new word for the science of demographics is; mega trends; “lots of people doing the same thing”. When you have large numbers of people doing the same thing it is easy to predict what will happen (if you study the numbers). The same thing is happening and it will get worse; only 2 out of 5 teachers (coming out of university) will be employed in the coming future. In the 70s there were many people going into debt to their eyeballs and what happened? The cost of borrowing money went sky high by so many people wanting to borrow. Twenty years later they are 40 years old what are they doing trying to figure out how to get distressed from working so hard to pay the loans off. The big bulge of age group is the 50 plus and the money is being spent on Grandkids and pets. Comparison between provinces; Quebecers- have a shorter life span- connected to their habit of smoking, Saskatchewan- have a lot of youth & seniors neither who bring in a lot of taxes, there will likely be problems with having the funds to keep services going in the future. Alberta has many working young families hardly any seniors; their costs for health care are down and there is a large tax base to draw from. BC has many seniors, there are fewer young families again impacting the Health Care system.