ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Canadian data and Canadian public policy challenges. Social policy, including public and private policy, of the 1990’s is often times undergirded by demographic analysis. In the United States, there has been remarkable public attention to intergenerational equity issues since the publication in 1984 of Preston’s Presidential address to the Population Association of America, and the simultaneous emergence of the lobby group, Americans for Generational Equity. In Canada, the social policy/demographics discussion has taken a different form. Demographic predictions in the past have been notoriously off the mark, foreseeing neither the baby boom after World War II, nor the contemporary baby bust. Demography is distinctly abstract, expending great amounts of energy not looking at human beings and behavior directly, but only as aggregate trends, seemingly beyond human will. Family, in both the United States and Canada, has recently become a hot public policy concern.
