Freedom 75
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the editor of Huddle.
I remember graduating from journalism school in 1995 in a very tight labour market. My industry was in flux (and still is today, of course) and there was great uncertainty because newspapers were already in decline and the prospect of those jobs eventually disappearing for good was very real.
There was also a relatively high unemployment rate in New Brunswick and that created an atmosphere of diminished opportunity across many sectors.
At the time, Frank McKenna was premier. With an aging population and outmigration of young people, he could see a workforce shortage on the horizon.
In a conversation with me in 2018, he said it was difficult to convince people there was a problem. In 1995, he formed a legislative committee to study the demographic challenges and propose solutions like increased immigration, but it went nowhere because no one thought there was a labour shortage, to begin with.
“We had a very, very high rate of unemployment [in 1995],” McKenna told me during that interview three years ago. “It was about 15 percent. I think it even got up to 17 percent – a very high rate of unemployment. It’s hard to convince people that we’ve got a workforce challenge when we’ve got a big percentage of our population that can’t get jobs.”
I thought about that conversation after reading a piece by David Campbell, the economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle “Insights” podcast. Earlier this week, Huddle re-published, Why The ‘Freedom 55’ Movement Has Negative Impacts on the N.B. Economy, from his “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” blog.
In the piece, he reflects on his early days in the workforce in the early 90s. He writes about a colleague who couldn’t wait to stop working and had a calendar in the office with a red circle around her retirement date. He writes about the big push back then to get people to retire early – the “Freedom 55” movement, with those commercials about idyllic days free of the office on the golf course or the beach.
At the time, I remember how we felt as young people. Older people should retire early, we thought, because they were taking up jobs and denying young people the opportunity to get started on their careers. The same kind of competitive attitude, or zero-sum game, would lead many people to oppose increased immigration over the next 25 years.
It’s a very different situation 25 years later. Pre-pandemic, the coming labour shortage was a significant problem, with 120,000 jobs becoming available over the next 10 years and not enough people to fill them. The push for increased immigration and programs like the Atlantic Immigration Pilot program was seen as necessary solutions to an increasingly urgent problem.
The pandemic has created uncertainties. There have been layoffs and companies and individuals have relied on government relief and subsidy programs to keep going as the economy initially shut down and then reopened with restrictions. And we don’t know how long we’ll have to maintain restrictions or shut down again entirely.
But we still need more people in the workforce if the economy is going to grow coming out of the pandemic, something both Campbell and Krista Ross of the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce stressed in columns in Huddle earlier this week.
And that will mean more immigrants and, yes, you guessed it, more older people who have already retired.
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Campbell’s piece was especially interesting because of the data he reported showing the potentially negative impact of the “Freedom 55” movement.
Since 2000, he says the workforce participation rate for people aged 55-69 has gone from more than 60 percent to 50 percent; the province has nearly 88,000 people in that age group out of the workforce. If only half of them were still working, he says it would relieve the shortage emerging in many industries, and with high-quality employees who still have a lot to contribute.
“For society, [early retirement] means less people working in what for many are the prime years of life – post-children but 20 years or more away from being ‘old’,” he writes.
PODCAST: Tyson Johnson On How N.B. Can Secure Its Share Of 3.5 Million Worldwide Cybersecurity Jobs
On the latest “Insights” podcast, Campbell and co-host Don Mills talk to an industry leader in one of the sectors with a need for people to fill the growing number of jobs: cybersecurity. CyberNB’s Tyson Johnson talks about an industry with 3.5 million unfilled jobs worldwide, many of which could be created here if the province has a large enough labour force to fill the needs.
I turn 55 myself in a few years, and I’ve playfully mused to Janet about early retirement, which gets a predictable reaction. With my industry still in transition, maybe I now have my plan B to get me to Freedom 75, with its beaches and golf courses. After all, it is the road taken by David Shipley, the former journalist and now CEO of the N.B. cybersecurity firm Beauceron Security. David, do I need to learn how to write code?
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Banner image: Anukrati Omar/Unsplash.