Somewhere around the middle of this year, history will be made in Canada.

Those old enough to leave the working world will outnumber the ones old enough to join it.

A first according to Stats Canada’s demographic number crunchers.

As retirement funds have suffered in recent years, increasing numbers of Canadians have stayed on the job past traditional retirement age.

Since 2000, the employment rate of those 65-to-69 has gone from one in nine to nearly one in four.

15-to-24-year-olds will briefly outnumber the 55-to-64-year-olds in the 2030s but projections indicate they’ll be nearly equal in size well beyond the middle of the century.

With low fertility likely to be a sustained trend, demographers say one of the ways to keep the population growing is immigration.