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The great scooter debate of 2007 had been percolating for some time before the commander of the local police detachment stood before city council at the end of June to clarify the whole issue once and for all.

Cyclists and drivers alike had been grumbling about sharing the town's winding roads with electric vehicles and their grey-haired pilots.

Under the law, as the commander laid out, "mobility vehicles" are analogous to pedestrians and stay off the roads. In other words: Tough luck, scooters.

But the pronouncement hasn't deterred the defiant citizens of Elliot Lake (population 12,500), Canada's most elderly community. On any given day, they whir down Hillside Drive against traffic, bent over their handlebars as if engaged in some tense game of chicken.

"They've pulled me over three times now for riding on the road," said one woman scooting her way toward Zellers, No Frills and the rest of the shops chiselled into a Precambrian knob, halfway along the 300 kilometres of uranium-rich Shield country that separates Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. "Like I'm some hardened criminal. They tell me to ride on the sidewalk, but it's too damned bumpy. The pavement's easier on me back."

While the scooter controversy smouldering in Elliot Lake has so far escaped national attention, the goings-on in this sleepy former mining town could be a harbinger of things to come for our aging nation.

"Elliot Lake is a living laboratory for the rest of the country," former mayor George Farkouh says. "The country should be coming here to see how we've done it."

In census data released two weeks ago, Elliot Lake tied with Parksville, B.C., as the country's oldest community. Given that Elliot Lake is aging so quickly - its median age has shot up from 24 to 55 in just 20 years - this isolated town should be leading the race in time for the next census.

The rest of the country won't be far behind. That same census data noted that one in seven Canadians is over 65 and anticipated the proportion to double in 25 years. More of us will retire from careers than embark on them over the next few decades.

Established in 1955 to supply the fissile heart of the budding arms race, Elliot Lake was once "the uranium capital of the world." By 1989, it was home to 4,500 miners quarrying a metal without a market. The future of the hardscrabble town that inspired a Stompin' Tom Connors song and the most poignant scenes from novelist Alistair MacLeod's modern classic No Great Mischief appeared so bleak that the power company refused to invest in the town's grid, resulting in rolling brown-outs.

"The town was in the balance," Mr. Farkouh says. "We were on the verge of disappearing."

So the city council found another primary industry: seniors. They hatched Elliot Lake Retirement Living, which snapped up housing left vacant by deserting miners and marketed it to retirees across the country.

By 1990, when the two major local mines finally announced closings, the city council began investing millions in making Elliot Lake senior-friendly. It renovated buildings and sidewalks to make them wheelchair accessible. It hired a seniors' issues officer to liaise between police and the growing retiree population. It built a $6-million 18-hole golf course and pushed through provincial legislation allowing it to develop condominiums along waterfront Crown land.

Retirees have responded by buying up Elliot Lake en masse. Many sold several-hundred-thousand-dollar homes in Southern Ontario and bought former miners' bungalows for less than $50,000, freeing up cash to fish, canoe and ski. Some even bought an old union hall and started the Renaissance Seniors' Centre, which attracts hundreds of locals for bridge, carpet bowling and bean-bag baseball.

Today, one in three Elliot Lakers is older than 65, up from about one in 30 in 1990. The occupancy rate stands at 97 per cent, pushing the average price of a small bungalow to $88,000 from $64,000 since 1998.

"We don't have much in the way of shopping here, but aside from that, there's no end of things to do here," said Norma Arnold, 76, who moved to Elliot Lake from Hamilton with husband Charles 11 years ago. "We've had Rita MacNeil here and Stuart McLean is coming in the fall."

Even if the town is a little isolated, livelier venues are, like all things in Elliot Lake, easily accessible. "There's always the bus that goes from here straight to the casino in the Soo," says Charles Arnold, 77.

But the top-heavy demographic has presented some vexing problems for the town.

For one, it can't keep enough practising doctors around. Last year, two of the 10 doctors in town retired. To curb the loss, council is hiring a full-time recruiter and ponying up extra funds to reel in young doctors. Last month, a new community medical complex opened up in the town centre. Built in partnership with Rexall, it has rent-free clinic space where new doctors can settle in with relatively few expenses.

At the same time that doctors are in short supply, the town's health-care needs are increasing. "We have really struggled," says St. Joseph's General Hospital chief executive officer Mike Hukezalie. "Nobody quite understands yet how to deal with this unique population."

The hospital has had to invest heavily in mechanical lifts, a bone density machine and the labour necessary to lift frail seniors out of chairs and onto beds, X-ray tables and into bathtubs.

It has also become the biggest employer in town, ahead of Algoma Manor and Huron Lodge, two of the three seniors homes in town.

With so much of the labour force dedicated to servicing the town's unwieldy retiree population, younger Elliot Lakers have few opportunities to pursue more fulfilling work.

"They say there's a labour shortage in town, but only if you want to be a plumber or an electrician or something," says Chris Burley, 22, walking to his janitorial job, with punk band Rise Against blaring through his headphones. "Reality is, there ain't a lot of good work here. If you're an old fart, great, but everybody my age just drinks and thinks about getting the hell out."

There's one other favourite pastime of younger folk drifting through Elliot Lake: scamming seniors.

Elliot Lake is a prime target for door-to-door salesmen peddling $4,500 air purifiers, telemarketers promising free trips to tropical climes and spammers posing as wealthy Nigerian generals looking for a nice Canadian to take a few million dollars off their hands.

"They blanket this community," says John Gagnon, seniors' issues officer with the OPP. "A lot of the seniors around here come from a generation when you took a person at their word, when a handshake was as good as a contract."

One woman lost $30,000 in a Nigerian e-mail racket before she finally approached Mr. Gagnon. Even after he told her she'd been scammed, the elderly woman sent another $15,000 to the fraudster. "By this time, the guy was phoning her at home and calling her 'Mum,' " Mr. Gagnon says.

There's a more heartrending aspect to his job. The local OPP detachment regularly fields reports of missing spouses. "But when they report to the caller's house, they often find that the missing wife has been dead for 15 years," he says. "That's when you know you've got someone on the cusp of dementia."

Elliot Lake is dealing with all these problems at great expense. That's the flipside to the town's grey boom. No one seems to know how much more it can age before it collapses under the weight of its service-intensive demographic.

"The aging population, it does put pressure on our services," Mayor Rick Hamilton says. "There will be a point when the tax base on a municipal basis can't take it any more."

Elliot Lakers hope to postpone that day indefinitely through good planning - or market intervention. With worldwide energy prices surging ever upward, uranium prices are hitting all-time highs. As in most former mining towns, there's constant chatter about the valuable rock still waiting in the surrounding white pine hills.

"If the mine starts going again, maybe I'll stay" says Mr. Burley, the janitor. "Otherwise, what's here? Can't just live off old people."