Public libraries are community hubs that can both create opportunities and address challenges often associated with later life and population aging. Using a thematic analysis of 18 in-depth interviews with public librarians, this study investigates common practices and challenges experienced while developing programs for older adults. This analysis is augmented by an environmental scan of older-adult programming offered in member libraries of the Canadian Urban Library Council (CULC). Results indicate that public librarians leverage community partnerships and staff training to develop programs that foster digital, financial, language, and health literacy and create opportunities for both intergenerational and peer social connection. At the same time, they face challenges related to limited space, budgets, and staff capacity, difficulty meeting the extensive and often conflicting interests of various groups within the library, and marketing programming to older adults. Findings indicate that public libraries may be key players in mitigating challenges often associated with having an aging population, and indeed highlight the many benefits of valuing and providing services to this population.

The aging of the population is expected to result in substantial increases in the costs of maintaining health care and pension programs, and that is a source of widespread concern. However, a proper assessment requires that attention be given to all categories of government expenditure, including education and others associated with younger age groups, and not just those associated with the older population. It requires also that privately provided goods and services be considered, since their costs must be charged against the same national income as publicly provided ones. Beyond that, it is important to recognize that population change affects not only the demand side of the economy, but also the supply side — the economy's productive capacity. An important conclusion is that while other influences will no doubt play a role, demographic effects by themselves are likely to cause government expenditure (all categories, all levels of government combined) to increase by no more than the rate of growth of the population, and by less than the rate of growth of the gross domestic product. Taking public and private costs together, and assigning appropriate weights to different age groups, the overall “dependency ratio” can be expected to remain at its current low level for another decade and a half or two decades, and then to rise as the baby boom generation retires in large numbers. However, the projected future ratio never reaches the levels of the 1950s and 1960s. Although the overall “burden” of population aging is manageable, major adjustments will be required in the coming decades, especially in the area of federal/provincial cost sharing. For the most part, though, the effects of population aging are predictable, slow, and some time off.

The baby boom generation is now well into middle age, and over the next few decades will reach old age. As the boom generation grows old the costs of maintaining existing social support systems will rise, and the ability or willingness to sustain those systems has been called into question. In this paper we discuss a number of issues related broadly to population aging in Canada and the associated social “costs,” including the costs of public services. We conclude that while population-related cost increases should be expected, and reallocations of resources required, the overall increases should be of manageable proportions.

During the 1960s and 1970s, The Netherlands had one of the youngest populations in Western Europe. In fact, a significant increase in the proportion of elderly in the population will not begin until after the year 2010. Despite this relatively late aging of the population, the Dutch government developed a policy on aging at an early stage, with particular attention to institutional care for the elderly. This move resulted in a high proportion of elderly living in institutions. In 1982, 3 per cent of the 65 + population lived in nursing homes and 9 per cent in homes for the elderly. These care institutions are organized on a non-profit basis and financed through direct or indirect taxation. Their population can be characterized as “frail elderly”. However, homes for the elderly were originally considered to be housing facilities for the elderly. The costs related to institutional care increased considerably in the 1960s and 1970s, but through procedures like specific planning criteria and assessing the need for admission into a home for the elderly, the government has attempted to contain the costs. Until the end of the 1980s, these attempts had not been very successful. One of the more successful means of containing costs seems to be the stipulation of community long-term care.

The parallels between the funding of an individual pension plan and a paygo social security system are presented. In each plan, the total expected value of benefits can exceed the total expected value of contributions. For the individual pre-funded plan this is true because of the discount factor, δ, representing investment income earnings. For the paygo social security system, the analogous “discount” factor is denoted r, the total of real growth rates of the labour force and real productivity gains per worker, that is, real growth in wealth production. The paper then presents arguments to show that a fully-funded social security scheme is no more secure economically than a paygo scheme. Both schemes rely on the ability of the economy to create and transfer wealth. That is, security for social security does not lie in privatization. The paper also reviews the Reform Party's proposal for a “Super RRSP” replacement for social security and analyses its advantages and disadvantages.

Being able to anticipate future needs for health services presents a challenge for health planners. Using existing population projections, two models are presented to estimate the demand for hospital beds in regions of Manitoba in 2020. The first, a current-use projection model, simply projects the average use for a recent three-year period into the future. The second, a 10-year trend analysis, uses Poisson regression to project future demand. The current-use projection suggests a substantial increase in the demand for hospital beds, while the trend analysis projects a decline. The last projections are consistent with ongoing increases in rates of day surgeries and declines in lengths of stay. The current-use projections need to be considered in the context of relatively low occupancy rates in rural hospitals and previous research on appropriateness of stays in acute care hospitals. If measures are taken to ensure more appropriate use of acute care hospital beds in the future, then the current-use projections of bed shortages are not a cause for concern.

The future of mandatory retirement is at least partly driven by changing demographics. In Canada, these demographics include slowing population growth, rapid aging, declining rates of labour force participation, and slowing labour force growth. After reviewing the demographic trends and considering alternate scenarios in labour force participation, we consider the determinants of early departures from the labour force and suggest scenarios that might reverse these trends. With a decline in labour force entrants, delays in early life transitions, and possible reductions in retirement benefits, a trend to retire later would bring mandatory retirement into question.

Canadians have expressed concern that access to a family physician (FP) has declined precipitously. Yet FP-to-population ratios remained relatively stable over the last decade, and there were perceptions of physician surpluses, at least in urban centres, 10 years ago. We evaluated whether demographic changes among patients and FPs, and in the volume of care received and provided over the period, contribute to this paradox. Given the relationship between age and FP use in fiscal year 1991/1992, an aging population should have been associated with a 2 per cent increase in visits by 2000/2001. Likewise, given the relationship between FP age and workloads in 1991/1992, an aging workforce should have been associated with a 12 per cent increase in service provision a decade later. Yet visit rates and average FP workloads remained unchanged. There was an increase in age-specific rates of FP use among older adults and a decline in rates among the young, and an increase in age-specific workloads such that older FPs provided many more services than their predecessors (30%) and younger FPs provided many fewer (20%). In terms of impact on future requirements for FPs, both changes in age-specific rates of use, and changes in age-specific patterns of FP productivity, trump population aging as key drivers.