Canada is headed toward a tighter labour market within a few years. Photo by AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

Get ready for a game changer.

Over the next five years, the last and largest group of baby boomers will turn 65, bringing on the biggest retirement wave Canada has seen yet, according to a new report from Royal Bank of Canada .

For the past 15 years since the first boomers turned 65, an estimated 5.2 million people have left the workforce. Within the next few years, 2.7 million more Canadians, now between the ages of 60 and 64, are likely to join them. (Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964.)

“With unemployment rising in the last three years, it can be easy to forget that the largest (and final) baby boomer cohort is about to reach official retirement age,” wrote RBC a

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