When everyone is over 70

I attended a New Year’s eve concert of schmaltzy Viennese music (Strauss, Lehar) last night at the concert hall of the Univesite de Sherbrooke. You can imagine the audience. I was separated from my wife and hostess, who are distinguished by heads of lush grey hair. In trying to find them I realized that 85% of the people there had a grey hair, and half of them seemed older than 75. About 15% of the audience was under 40, and that is a generous estimate. Concerts of Viennese schmaltz attract geezers for sure, but these people used to be separatists in the 1970s. This was truly a monocultural monoethnic environment, with scarcely an exception.

 

Occasionally you see evidence of major demographic change – as when my wife and I got on the bus in Toronto a few years back and found ourselves the only white people among fifty passengers.

Canada has been trying to make up for its demographic collapse with massive immigration. Thus it was bracing, to say the least, to listen to Peter Zeihan’s latest on Canada’s problems of immigration, demographics, and whether we can sustain it for long.