BC baby boomers are proportionately an even larger group than their age-mates south of the 49th parallel. And the oldest of them, born in 1946, are just two years away from their 60th birthdays.
Look at this fascinating graphic from Statistics Canada: it’s a century-long animation of the province’s population by year of age. (See other provinces here.) In the image below, you can see the 2001 age structure of the BC population.
The boomers are the prominent bulge in the middle years—what demographers call the “pig in the python.” The mini bulge beneath them are the members of the generation of children born to the baby boom. This group is called the “echo boom” or the “boomlet”. The skinny part between them—the “birth dearth” generation—are currently in their peak childbearing years, hence the relative paucity of births we’re currently experiencing.
