Canadian diners spend $40B in restaurants

A lot of Canadian baby boomers supposedly entered their prime restaurant-spending years, said to start in their 50s and lasting until their mid-60s. This means that the restaurant sector growth looks extremely promising across Canada for at least the next decade. Canadian diners approximately spend over $40 billion in restaurants. And nearly 40 percent of Canadian household food dollars are spent on dining out.

In this connection, some visionary restaurant operators are now creating new menus made specially for the health conscious boomers. The innovative menu has been customized to the aging generation with health concerns. The concerns could be salt, MSG, sugar, milk, cheese, food with nuts. The portions are also smaller like one chicken breast instead of two. It has also been taken into consideration that baby boomers prefer quieter environment without the usual loud lounge music background when they dine out.

On the subject of marriage, recent survey results concluded that the average age of people getting married for the first time in Canada was 30.6 years for men and 28.5 years for women. The numbers exclude Ontario and same-sex marriage. This simply means that Canadians are no longer in a rush to tie the knot.

In 1973, for comparison, Canadian men were getting married at the age of 25.2 and women at 22.8. This lifestyle trend is largely due to couple cohabiting and delaying marriage.

However, in 2004, the Yukon, Ontario and British Columbia saw increase in the number of marriages while other provinces and territories saw a decline. Quebec has the lowest marriage rate because of the higher number of common-law couples in the very liberal province. Statistics Canada said that future data will include same-sex marriage.

The latter can no longer be ignored because in 2003, Ontario and British Columbia became the first two provinces to legalize same-sex marriage and Canada became the only country in the world that allowed same-sex marriages between two people who were not residents of Canada.

Canada’s marriage rate is 4.7 marriages per 1,000 people, lower than the United States where it is 7.5.

Meanwhile, in the airline business, Canadian carriers are doing brisk business these days. The country’s strong economy is seeing Canada’s two largest airlines post record highs for load factor in 2007.

Westjet Airlines, the upstart Calgary-based economy airline had 75.9 percent on a capacity of 1.2 billion available seat miles, said to be the airline’s best January load factor in history. And the giant Air Canada posted a system load factor of 77.8 percent on a capacity of five billion available seat miles, a new January record. Regional affiliate Jazz reported 69.3 percent, up 3.1 percentage points from the same month in 2006.

Analysts claim that the market is growing, that the Canadian dollar is strong, that more Canadians are traveling around Canada instead of going to the USA, that the local airlines changed the seasonality of travel by increasing travel levels in the slower months and that new product innovations are working. Another factor is the simplified fare structure which helped also in making the Canadian airlines fly high.

An Ipos Reid poll was conducted to find out what Canadians feared or worried most these days and the results are:

• Climate change/global warming

• Terrorism/religious fanaticism

• Flu pandemic/disease outbreak

• Energy shortages

• Nuclear proliferation

On the subject of romance, Canadians claim to be a romantic lot as 94 percent of married couples expect to be with their spouses for the rest of their lives. However, if we are to believe research findings, most 80 percent of men and 57 percent of women claim they are not having enough sex.

Part of the problem is that life gets in the way, and sexual intimacy tends to erode given stress and a lack of time or communication.

On the subject of attitudes, the survey found that Canadian women are slightly more open-minded than men. Men are more in support to active foreign policy interventions while the women are more liberal when it comes to social more and alternative lifestyles.