The workers employers avoid may be the ones they need most

Older workers are vital to Canada’s economy, but employers rarely take advantage of what they offer

Canada’s labour market is being held together by older workers, yet our institutions still behave as if everyone checks out at 65. We built our retirement systems for a much shorter lifespan, and the result is predictable: the people keeping the country running are the same ones many employers still treat as expendable.

Canadians are living well into their 80s, yet many assumptions about work and retirement still come from a time when hitting 70 was a rarity. The tidy three-stage life of school, work and retire belongs to another era. People shift careers, retrain and often hit their stride later in life, but a surprising number of workplaces act as if this evolution never happened.

This disconnect is creating pressure across the labour market. Younger workers face housing costs and wage stagnation. Older workers, who want or need to stay employed, are brushed aside by hiring practices stuck in the 1990s. That combination does not lead to a resilient labour market; it leads to frustration on all sides.

Employers in almost every sector complain about labour shortages. Canada still has more than half a million job vacancies, including 505,900 in the second quarter of 2025, with health care, the skilled trades and transportation consistently short of staff. Those numbers make employers’ reluctance to consider a qualified 68- or 72-year-old applicant almost impossible to justify.

Canadians aged 55 and older now represent more than one-fifth of the entire workforce. Our worker-to-retiree ratio has fallen from nearly seven to one in the 1970s to about three to one today, and it is expected to move closer to two to one in the coming decade. Older Canadians are already holding up a big piece of the labour market whether employers acknowledge it or not.

The stereotype of the cranky curmudgeon waiting for the early-bird special has not made sense for years. Many people in their late 60s and 70s are working, volunteering, building businesses or caring for family, often while coping with higher expenses and shrinking retirement expectations.

The financial reality is harder to ignore. Many older Canadians simply cannot afford to retire. The Canada Pension Plan replaces about a quarter of the average worker’s income. Old Age Security tops out at just over $700 a month for those aged 65 to 74 and just over $800 for those 75 and over, depending on income. These programs do not, and were never intended to, fund a comfortable retirement.

Add inflation, housing costs and interest rates, and it is no mystery why so many keep working.

But financial necessity is not the whole story. Many older workers also discover something that challenges the old myths. They are not finished at 60. Not even close. Most people never wanted a decades-long idle retirement in the first place.

This is where employers should pay attention. Older workers carry vast amounts of institutional knowledge that many organizations have never bothered to capture. They hold the practical know-how, the problem-solving habits and the memory of what has been tried before and what failed. When that knowledge walks out the door through retirement, companies often discover too late that no one left behind knows how the place actually works.

Replacing that experience is expensive. Studies estimate the cost of losing a long-tenured employee at 50 to 200 per cent of their annual salary. The belief that hiring younger is always cheaper dissolves quickly once the training bills and preventable mistakes start rolling in.

However, modern knowledge management is not just about documenting procedures. It depends on judgment, the ability to read a situation because you have seen it before, and the instincts that come only from long experience. Their judgment, perspective and steadying influence help organizations avoid costly errors and give younger employees something we do not talk enough about: mentorship from people who know what they are doing.

And none of what older workers contribute is hard for employers to tap into. Flexible schedules, phased retirement options, cross-generational teams and structured mentoring programs go a long way. Employers just have to stop pretending that talent automatically expires at a particular birthday.

We can keep clinging to a retirement model built for a different century, or we can accept the reality in front of us. Older workers are not a stopgap; they are a cornerstone.

Dana Wilson is a freelance writer.