Back in 1996, a book became an unexpected Canadian bestseller. It wasn't a thriller or a celebrity memoir. It was a book about demographics.

Boom, Bust & Echo, written by economist David Foot and journalist Daniel Stoffman, sold over 300,000 copies and stayed on bestseller lists for more than three years. The premise was simple but powerful: demographics explain about two-thirds of everything. If you understood how populations age and move through life stages, you could predict the future of housing markets, health care systems, employment, and even consumer trends.

The book looked at three main groups. The Boomers, born between 1947 and 1966, who represented a third of Canada's population. The Busters (what we now call Gen X), born from 1967 to 1979. And the Echo generation (Millennials), born from 1980 onward.

Three decades later, we're living in the future they predicted. Some of their forecasts were eerily accurate. Others missed the mark completely. And the difference between what they got right and what they got wrong tells us something important about how Canada's housing crisis came to be.

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The prediction that nailed it: Health care chaos

Here's what the book said in 1996:

"Provincial governments are closing hospitals and putting a new emphasis on home health care just as the front end of the massive baby-boom generation is about to turn 50 and start needing more health care services."

Not exactly a bold prediction, you might think. Of course aging people need more health care. But what made this forecast valuable was its specificity and timing. The authors understood that policy decisions made in the 1990s would collide with demographic reality in the 2020s.

And they were right. Today, hospitals remain overwhelmed, personal support workers are in chronic short supply, and home health care services struggle to keep up with demand. The front edge of the Boomer generation has now turned 78. The demographic wave they predicted has arrived.

What's interesting is that governments saw this coming and still didn't fully prepare. Canada brought in more personal support workers through temporary foreign worker programs. Investments were made in home care infrastructure. But the fundamental challenge remained: how do you dramatically increase the number of health care workers while keeping wages affordable for a government-funded system?

The answer, it turned out, was that you don't. At least not easily. Personal support work remains difficult, often part-time, and modestly paid. The job market hasn't made it appealing enough to attract the workforce needed. So we continue to rely heavily on immigration to fill these roles, which works until broader economic pressures change immigration policy.

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The immigration advice Canada ignored

This next prediction is where things get uncomfortable. In 1996, the authors wrote:

"As the echo generation enters the labour market in the first decade of the next century, Canada will need to consider curtailing immigration. It does not make sense to bring in a flood of 20-year-old immigrants to compete for scarce jobs just when large numbers of Canadian-born 20-year-olds are also entering the labour market."

Canada did the opposite.

Instead of reducing immigration as Millennials entered the workforce, Canada ramped it up. Between 2022 and 2024, Canada's youth population aged 15 to 24 increased by 9.9%, compared to overall population growth of 6%. Immigration accounted for almost 98% of population growth in 2023.

The result? Youth unemployment hit 14.7% in September 2025, the highest September rate since 2010 outside of the pandemic years. For students looking for summer work in 2025, the unemployment rate reached 17.9%, the worst summer job market since 2009.

Why did Canada ignore this advice? The thinking went something like this: with so many Boomers retiring, who would pay for their pensions and health care? If you only had eight Millennials supporting ten Boomers, their tax burden would be crushing. But if you added more young workers through immigration, you'd have ten or eleven Millennials supporting those same ten Boomers. The math seemed to work.

Except it didn't account for the housing shortage. Or the strain on infrastructure. Or the competition for entry-level jobs. The policy solved one problem while creating several others.

Now, after years of record population growth, Canada has reversed course. The federal government reduced permanent resident targets from 500,000 in 2024 to 395,000 in 2025, with further cuts planned. The goal is to temporarily pause population growth to ease pressure on housing and services.

The irony is hard to miss. The book warned about this exact scenario in 1996.

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The housing prediction that aged like milk

And then there's the real estate forecast. This is where Boom, Bust & Echo got it spectacularly wrong:

"Houses will be what they were before the Boomers entered the housing market, places to live in rather than investments. Boomers who think they will be able to sell their houses in, say, 2010 and live in luxury thereafter on the proceeds will be in for a surprise."

The authors predicted a housing crash. They believed that as Boomers aged and downsized, there would be a glut of family homes on the market. Demand would dry up. Prices would fall. Housing would return to being shelter rather than a wealth-building vehicle.

This was conventional wisdom in the 1990s. Home prices had crashed in the early 1990s recession and stayed relatively flat through the decade. It seemed logical that fewer buyers would mean lower prices.

Instead, Canadian home prices surged. The Toronto housing market saw prices outpace income growth by about 60% since the Global Financial Crisis. By 2024, affordability had deteriorated to the point where homebuying costs consumed 54% of household income across Canada, compared to 39% in 2019.

What did they miss?

First, immigration. The book assumed immigration would taper off. Instead, it accelerated dramatically. More people meant more demand for housing, particularly in major cities.

Second, interest rates. No one in 1996 predicted the decades-long decline in borrowing costs that would follow. Lower rates meant people could afford larger mortgages, which pushed prices higher.

Third, building restrictions. Urban growth boundaries, zoning regulations, and lengthy approval processes made it harder to build new homes. Supply constraints met surging demand, and prices soared.

Fourth, Boomers didn't downsize the way everyone expected. Many stayed in their family homes well into retirement. The predicted flood of available housing never materialized.

And perhaps most importantly, the authors underestimated how entrenched housing-as-investment had become. They thought it was a Boomer phenomenon that would fade. Instead, it intensified. Housing became the primary wealth-building tool for an entire generation, then the next, and the next.

The book's most telling line might be this one: "Houses will be what they were before the Boomers entered the housing market." That assumes there was some golden age of housing as pure shelter. But if you look back further, you'd probably find people in 1976 saying the same thing about the generation before them.

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What we actually needed (but couldn't deliver)

The authors also made a policy recommendation that Canada never seriously pursued:

"Because there will be relatively fewer taxpayers, government will have to move gradually from taxation of labour income to taxation of capital income. A country with an aging population has to consider increased taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains, and corporate profits."

The logic was sound. If you have fewer workers and more retirees, you need to find revenue somewhere other than employment income. Tax the wealth that had accumulated rather than the wages people were earning.

Canada didn't do this. When the Trudeau government tried to increase the capital gains inclusion rate in 2024, it faced fierce resistance. Property investors, business owners, and high-income earners pushed back hard. The measure passed but the political cost was significant.

The challenge is political, not economic. When a large cohort of voters is about to retire and sitting on substantial real estate wealth, it's difficult to convince them to support policies that would tax that wealth. You're asking people to vote against their immediate financial interests for the good of the broader economy.

Imagine being an NBA team and proposing a special tax on tall people. It's not going to pass.

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The millennial squeeze

For younger Canadians, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, the confluence of these failed predictions has been brutal.

They entered a job market flooded with other young workers, thanks to high immigration that was supposed to help fund Boomer retirements. Youth unemployment reached levels not seen in over a decade. Entry-level job vacancies fell by 33.8% between 2023 and 2024.

At the same time, they watched housing prices climb far faster than their wages. The promise that houses would become affordable as Boomers aged turned out to be completely wrong. Instead, housing became less attainable than at any point in recent history.

And because capital gains on primary residences remain untaxed, the wealth gap between those who bought property before prices soared and those trying to enter the market now continues to widen. Someone who bought a home in 2004 in southwestern Ontario and simply lived in it has seen their wealth grow faster than someone working a full-time professional job could save.

This isn't about individual success or failure. It's about the structural reality created by policy choices that prioritized short-term solutions over long-term planning.

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What the book got right about everything

Here's the final quote from Boom, Bust & Echo, and it's worth sitting with:

"In the final analysis, what is the balance between these pros and cons? Is the demographic shift good or bad? The answer is that it is neither. It is simply a fact of life, and the better we understand it, the better we can prepare for the changes before they occur and adjust to them once they have taken place."

This is what the book nailed. Demographics aren't destiny, but they're not optional either. You can't wish away an aging population or pretend a large generation entering retirement won't affect the economy.

The question is whether you plan for it or react to it.

Canada largely reacted. When faced with the retirement of the Boomers, policymakers chose to boost immigration rather than reform tax policy or dramatically increase housing supply. Each choice made sense in isolation but created downstream effects that are now colliding with each other.

High immigration without corresponding housing supply led to an estimated shortage of 2.3 million homes by 2030. The government now aims to build 480,000 homes annually to restore affordability, double the normal rate and a pace not seen since World War II.

But even if that target is met, CMHC's own estimates suggest buying a home will be less affordable for nearly half the country by 2035. Prices are expected to rise almost everywhere. The question is whether they'll rise faster than incomes.

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The lesson for today

The real value of looking back at Boom, Bust & Echo isn't about whether predictions were accurate. It's about understanding that demographic trends are visible years in advance, but acting on them requires political will.

The book saw the Boomer retirement wave coming three decades ago. It identified the potential problems: health care demand, labor market pressures, intergenerational wealth transfers. The information was there.

What was missing was the mechanism to act on it. Politicians face election cycles measured in years, not decades. Voters respond to immediate concerns, not distant projections. And major policy shifts almost always create winners and losers, making them politically difficult even when economically necessary.

We're now living through the consequences of choices made (and not made) over the past thirty years. And the demographic trends ahead are just as visible as they were in 1996.

Canada's population is aging. The median age is rising again as immigration slows. The ratio of workers to retirees continues to shift. These are facts, not opinions.

The question is what we'll do about it this time.

Will we build enough housing to accommodate the population we have? Will we reform tax policy to reflect demographic realities? Will we invest in the infrastructure needed to support an aging population? Or will we continue to make short-term fixes that create new problems down the road?

The book that became a surprise bestseller in 1996 couldn't predict exactly what would happen. No one can. But it showed that demographics matter, that they're knowable, and that ignoring them has consequences.

Thirty years later, we'restill learning that lesson.