Thunder Bay's aging population won't keep up with demand for workers, new data suggests

New labour market projections suggest the aging population in Thunder Bay can't sustain the existing economy, despite seeing early success in programs designed to boost the northwestern Ontario city's workforce. 

One in five Thunder Bay district residents is already over 65, and according to the North Superior Workforce Planning Board, those aging out of jobs aren't being replaced quickly enough, despite programs designed to replenish the workforce. 

"I haven't seen enough results at the end of these programs that are bringing people in or training them," says planning board executive director Madge Richardson. "The numbers are not keeping up to the demand and it's still taking longer to respond to the demand."

This local data fits in line with new census figures from Statistics Canada that suggest Canada's working population is older than it has ever been. More than one in five working adults is now nearing retirement, according to Statistics Canada — a demographic shift that will create significant challenges for the workforce in the coming decade.

A report by the North Superior Workforce Planning Board that was released in 2015 projected the district would need 50,000 new migrants by 2041. That figure was based on a metric called the Demographic Dependency Ratio, used to measure the share of a population's working age. The ideal rate is represented as 0.5, meaning a community has a ratio of two people in their working years to one of those either under 14 or over 65.

Without intervention, Richardson foresees the ratio could increase as high as 0.78 by 2035. As Thunder Bay's population increased by nearly 1,000 in the past five years including 250 new immigrants, her 2022 projections suggest the ratio will peak at 0.67.

She said her revised assessment proves the early effectiveness of programs launched since 2015, such as her Connector mentorship program, the Northern Policy Institute's Matchmaker program, and the federal Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot project.

But it's not nearly enough, she said. 

The number of local seniors is expected to climb from 31,500 in 2020 to around 40,0000 by 2030, then stay steady at that number through 2046. 

The new projections, shared by the Ontario Ministry of Finance, assume accelerated success of existing programs. Those programs, however, only have short-term funding. FedNor has committed to fund the Connector program through 2023 and the immigration pilot will expire in 2024. 

Richardson said she's "cautiously optimistic," but those writing short-term grants on the local level are already burning out as they work to meet the bureaucracy's needs. She's also still seeing some local resistance to increasing immigration, but said every willing worker is needed to meet this demographic challenge. 

"We have to ensure everyone who's born here and lives here is competitive in the labour market and they get the skills so they can apply and they can work in this economy," she said. "But we also want to welcome the people who want to move here, and we also have to ensure they have access to that training, to those opportunities. And it has to be both, otherwise we'll never have the numbers to balance the equation."

There are already labour shortages in some sectors. 

In 2021, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) identified 98 physician vacancies in northwestern Ontario, alone. The Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Corporation estimates the mining sector will need 2,000 new construction workers by 2024 and the sector's total employment will double by 2040.