Like every other city in Canada, Toronto is ageing. Its older population is expected to grow by 60 per cent in the next 20 years alone. To address this coming of age, the City developed its first Seniors Strategy in 2013 and is now working on updating it. One of the lingering issues is how to maintain the quality of life of older Torontonians as they give up their driver’s licences.

Over the course of your life, your parents most likely put food in your stomach, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head and eventually set you on a path for adulthood and independence. You may now be repeating that cycle for your own children as generations of people have been doing since the beginning. The last century, though, has seen an unprecedented disruption to that cycle with a rapidly growing number of Canadians now becoming unexpected members of the new ‘sandwich generation.’ Why is this? Well for one thing we are all living longer than any one of us expected to even a century ago when our average life expectancy was still only 51 years of age. While there have always been folks who lived much longer than that, they tended to be those who avoided the misfortunes of life and poor health.

The population of Canadians aged 65 and over is growing. In fact, it’s expected to double over the next two decades. This means that many more Canadians will be thinking about how they would like to live as they enter their later years. Given what we know about the priorities of older adults today, most Canadians will want to be independent, active, and to live at home.