No reason to bury your head in the gray sand: Quebec is aging. And fast. Like everything else in the west and in the most prosperous Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and China.

Compared to Canada, the province in which the baby boom The 1950s and 1960s has proven to be one of the most densely populated in the country and is indeed showing more noticeable signs of aging. Data from Statistics Canada’s latest census shows that people aged 65 and older made up 20.6% of Quebec residents in 2021, while they made up 18.6% of the population in the rest of Canada.

But again, the situation in Quebec is not an anomaly. The Atlantic provinces have the oldest population in the country: 22.7% of the 2.4 million Canadians living there are of retirement age. In the group of four major provinces, British Columbia is closest to Quebec: people aged 65 and over make up 20.4% of the population.

All Atlantic provinces and British Columbia have a higher median age than Quebec at 42.8 years. At 41.8, Ontario is not far behind.

Internationally, by examining data compiled by the World Bank, we see that the proportion of people aged 65 and over in Quebec is in the same waters as that in Sweden (20.5%), France (21%) and in Germany (22%) It is higher than in the United States (17%) but lower than in Finland (23%), Italy (23.6%) and Japan (29%!).

In addition, Canadian families are similar from one region to another: the number of children per household they live in is 1.7 in the Atlantic and British Columbia, 1.8 in Quebec and Ontario, and 1.9 on the Prairies.