News

Who exactly is a baby boomer? For today's special section, The Globe is using the definition of University of Toronto demographer and economist David Foot: A Canadian boomer is anyone living here (including immigrants) born from 1947 to 1966.

Prof. Foot made his case in his 1996 bestseller, Boom, Bust & Echo, counting in the boom every age group that numbered more than 400,000 at the time. “You can't use that now,” he says, “since the front end of the baby boomers, in their late 50s, is beginning to pass away.”

According to Statistics Canada, boomers make up a bit more than 30 per cent of the population. In his book, Prof. Foot dubbed Canada's boom the “loudest . . . in the industrialized world.” The population spike was shorter in the United States, much shorter in Europe and the United Kingdom, and longer but less pronounced in Australia.

However, the bookends of 1947 and 1966 don't conform to many people's assumptions. They may situate the start of the boom in 1946. Prof. Foot agrees that this is when the boom hit the U.S. — attributable in part to American troops arriving home to start making babies — but many Canadian soldiers remained behind in Europe for an extra year.

In Canada, Prof. Foot says, “births were going up in the 1940s, but they really took a jump in 1947.”

At the boom's height, Canadian women were averaging four offspring each, a rate that peaked in 1959, when 479,000 babies were born. Prof. Foot places the boom's end at 1966, “halfway down the hill” of the declining fertility rates of the 1960s.

Again, in this case, Canada is different than the U.S., where the boom ended in 1964, likely due to the faster adoption of the birth-control pill.

“In Canada, births started declining in the early 1960s, but there were still lots of babies born. They're my Generation X,” Prof. Foot says.

Many people born in this final quarter of the boom aren't happy to be called boomers. They see Gen X as having had far fewer opportunities, and so define themselves in opposition to the boom. “Their experience at the tail end of the baby boom is totally different from that of an older brother or sister born in the first half,” Prof. Foot admits.

Culturally speaking, they have more in common with what Prof. Foot calls the “baby bust,” born 1967 to 1979 — which in common parlance is often also referred to as Gen X.

“There's a shadow effect culturally. Someone born in 1968 will have a lot in common with someone born in 1964 or 1965. It's not nearly as clear-cut at the back end as at the front. They were a pretty disadvantaged group. Their lives are back on track now.”

However, they were still a relatively large cohort compared with those who followed — and that, by Prof. Foot's calculation, makes them boomers.

“Numbers. It's just numbers,” he says. “We don't control when we're born, but it can have a major implication on our life and life experiences.”