boom, bust and echo: how to profit from the coming demographic shift sold more than 300,000 copies after it was published in 1996, with a followup in 2000. stoffman, who died this summer in vancouver, shared the royalties equally with university of toronto economist david foot.
but an odd thing happened largely because of this best-selling book. its spotlight on canada’s baby-boom cohort of almost 10 million people has often been misinterpreted, if not distorted, by corporate leaders and federal politicians. that did not please stoffman , a journalist, author and secular jew who described himself as a “radical centrist.”
stoffman, who once worked as a reporter at the vancouver sun and edited the university of b.c. student newspaper, the ubyssey , wrote 13 books before he died in vancouver at age 78 on july 3. they included profiles of canadian tire, barrick gold, boston pizza and mccain foods, plus the money machine, an unusually readable look at the mutual fund industry.
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most commentators, scholars and journalists have only recently been catching up with some of stoffman’s analysis in his book who gets in: what’s wrong with canada’s immigration program — and how to fix it, which was a finalist for the donner prize in public policy.
stoffman also anticipated the questions pundits are now raising about the federal liberals’ related migration decisions to allow the number of foreign students and other non-permanent residents to reach almost two million, a figure cibc’s benjamin tal cited this week . that compares to about half a million when trudeau was first elected.
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former immigration minister ahmed hussen, echoing trudeau’s talking points about the need to welcome immigrants, foreign students and guest workers to “grow our economy,” often justified his approach by referring to what he characterized as the baby boom problem.
the second reason is many immigrants bring dependants . that is especially true under the liberals, who quadrupled the number of parents and grandparents that could be sponsored.
the university of b.c.’s david green and mcmaster’s byron spencer, both economists, have their own unique way of responding to the supposed dilemma of aging baby boomers. wryly, they say, the only conceivable way high immigration could offset canada’s retiring workforce would be if every newcomer was a 15-year-old orphan . that’s because it would take 50 years for the teens to reach retirement age and, as orphans, they would not seek to bring in parents or grandparents.
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“i think the main purpose of canada’s high immigration policy is to lower wages — and inflate real estate values,” he said in 2015.
in recent years, economists like don wright, former head of the b.c. government’s civil service, mikal skuterud of the university of waterloo, and the b.c. business council’s david williams have been strongly making the argument about lagging wages.
stoffman was among the first to argue that canada could deal with the societal costs of a large baby boom (which once made up 31 per cent of the population, but is now down to 23 per cent ) by increasing productivity through innovation. alas, in recent years productivity has fallen.
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another way is to offer incentives for canadians to stay longer in the workforce, which the baby boom is doing . canada could also encourage more people to have children, he said, particularly by providing better and cheaper daycare.