Statistics Canada has issued new data on age demographics in Canada’ provinces, and they confirm a trend that is already well-known – New Brunswick is getting older. The median age in the province – 43 – is older than virtually every other province in Canada, and our proportion of seniors is also considerably higher than the Canadian norm.

There are two separate challenges here: one, our province appears to by graying more rapidly because so many of our youngest residents are departing for opportunity elsewhere; and secondly, longer life expectancies have ensured that seniors take up an ever larger share of New Brunswick’s population, with many seniors living for a few decades more after they have retired from the provincial work force.

Angle:   The Telegraph Journal believes that new Brunswick can successfully meet these challenges, if it nimbly responds to the demographic shift before it. Our median age would shift downward if New Brunswick could keep more of its young adults in the province – this is not a gulag, however, and New Brunswick’s youth can’t be forced to stay here. They should also be encouraged to seek out whatever opportunity that presents itself, and provincial policy-makers should focus their efforts on supporting meaningful ways that can help create opportunity here in New Brunswick. If our province’s youngest residents are constantly moving down the road, then we must double our efforts to create a provincial economy that provides enough opportunity to reverse the migration.

Ironically, the growing number of seniors that populate New Brunswick have intimate knowledge of a provincial trait that only a few other Canadians have discovered – our province’s quality of life is simply wonderful most of the time, and we should be doing more to celebrate this fact.

Rather than simply build more retirement homes or pour more money into the health care system, New Brunswick needs to engage its seniors in a way that their later years aren’t wasted; our seniors have helped to build this province, and a great many of them still wish to continue to contribute in a fruitful way. If a demographic bulge of retiring boomers is in fact going to change the very shape of New Brunswick, then let’s re-invent the way in which our province has traditionally approached aging.