Old Ontario needs new age thinking.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: Economically Speaking

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Maybe if he were alive today in Northern Ontario he might say everybody talks about Vieux-Ontario, but nobody seems to do anything about it.

Vieux-Ontario is my new name for Northern Ontario. It updates the wonderful French name for the region, Nouvel-Ontario, to take into account recent Census results. The 2016 Census shows that on average people here in the North are older than people in the south. This isn't news, of course: the 2011 Census said the same thing. We Northerners are getting older faster than the rest of the country.

Every newspaper in the North has reported on the demographic difference, but not one had any useful ideas about what to do about it. No city council has adopted a plan to make their city more attractive for older people. The province has no Guidelines on Adapting Yesterday's Towns for Tomorrow's People.

It isn't surprising that we are all talk and no action: older populations elect councils with older brains. Older brains don't always contain the kind of ideas that are being discussed at strongtowns. org, for example. If older brains don't have a subscription to a good source of new ideas they will just go on making decisions to fit the towns they grew up in 40 years ago.

The Northern population has changed in important ways over the last 40 years. Our population pyramid doesn't look like a pyramid anymore. The top part, from 53 years to age 100, still looks like the Great Pyramid at Giza. Below 53, it actually starts to shrink. Three per cent of the Canadian population is 53 years old. Just 2 per cent is one year old. Our population pyramid looks like a cone standing on a wonky cardboard box.

Until the end of the baby boom, more children were being added to the base of the pyramid each year. After the baby boom, the pyramid gets thinner. It seems that baby boomers were not great babymakers. In Vieux-Ontario, the pyramid looks even worse. The top is one third wider--almost 4 per cent of the Northern population is exactly 55. The bottom is narrower. Job losses have taken bites out of the age group from 25 to 49. This depressing pattern repeats itself in each of the cities of...