Every Thursday morning when I appear on Newstalk 1010, the producer sends me a set of news clippings the host, John Moore, may bring up. This morning my clippings included an article from Healthing.ca titled: "The over 50's are better prepared for the pandemic."
It claimed that 41 per cent of Canadians over age 50 are faring much better than Millennials and Generation X right now. It was an odd thing to wake up to because my bedtime reading the previous night was a report about the other 59 per cent of seniors who are not faring well at all.
Senior poverty
We’ve all heard that Baby Boomers (like myself) have little to complain about because this generation is so wealthy. We are supposed to be well-pensioned homeowners who can easily tuck up at home until the pandemic is over. That is one of the first myths busted in a report by two respected social agencies in Toronto: Social Planning Toronto and Well Living House. Consider this:
“There are about 78,000 working seniors in Toronto, some of whom may have lost work, experienced reduced hours, or stopped working because of exposure risks. Working seniors who have lost income as a result of COVID-19 may be eligible for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). The CERB, which offers $2,000/month, is a taxable benefit, and eligibility is not affected by pension income.”
These Torontonians who work well beyond age 65 are usually still paying a mortgage or are renters. In other words, they are housing-insecure in a city whose costs are growing and work because they need to. Some of these working seniors live right here in Don Valley North alongside some of the wealthiest seniors in the city. We are a ward with a substantial senior population — and it turns out ours is an "uneasy" sort of wealth unless we own our homes outright.
The numbers
Seniors make up a substantial proportion of the population in many Toronto neighbourhoods, particularly along its edges. Hillcrest Village and Bayview Woods-Steeles are two of only four neighbourhoods in the city where 25 per cent of the population is comprised of residents over age 65. That won’t be the case for long; as the number of seniors grows across Canada, Toronto will see more neighbourhoods joining this list.
Other neighbourhoods with fast-growing senior populations are racialized communities. Tower block villages such as Parkway Forest have a mixture of seniors who have downsized to a condo and immigrant seniors who have been hard-working, stable renters for decades but whose incomes aren’t keeping pace with the rest of us.
As Social Planning points out: “Overall, immigrants have not seen income gains during the last 35 years; they typically earn lower incomes than their Canadian-born counterparts. Immigrants face discrimination and barriers within the labour market during their working life, which disadvantages them during retirement. They are far less likely to obtain pensioned employment than the post-war generation of immigrants who found their way to these types of employment in the booming fifties and sixties, more easily.”
Pay equity
One of the most important findings in the report is that we have not closed the gap between men and women — and it's causing huge challenges in the senior community. Canada’s universal pension schemes and survivor benefits were meant to address the challenges faced by widowed and vulnerable senior women long ago, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
Early projections of universal wealth among seniors may have been based on achieving pay equity in the Canadian workforce by the year 2000 — which, by and large, has not happened. Futurists also assumed the practice of employer-provided pension plans would continue to grow and that working women would realize their own retirement incomes as a result.
But as we all know, the number of employers providing pension plans is shrinking every year. In fact, feminized jobs were among the first to phase out employee pensions.
Economic insecurity for senior women is shaped by gendered life courses. Women tend to have interrupted employment histories and low lifetime earnings, and their Canada Pension Plan (CPP) or private pension payments reflect that.
This is because women are more likely to leave their jobs to care for children and other family members. Then, there's the fact that female-dominated occupations tend to be low-paid, part-time and precarious. These conditions systematically reduce the ability of women to achieve economic security through current retirement income programs.
Among seniors who live alone, 70.1 per cent are women. Unsurprisingly, this number increases with age. Notably, seniors living in nursing homes, long-term care homes and other collective dwellings are not included in these figures. One of the reasons we see such high rates of senior poverty along the northeastern edge of Don Valley North is because this community has two low-income seniors' buildings where most tenants are women hoping to avoid long-term care.
Many studies show that seniors who live alone are more likely to experience poverty. According to the 2016 Census, over one-third of Toronto seniors who live alone are in poverty — double the poverty rate for seniors overall.
The squirrel and the grasshopper
I know I am loading a lot of troubling information into this column but we must take this seriously. My 70-year old sister has already had to move to Nova Scotia to afford living alone on CPP. Recently, she asked me: “Why don’t people under 65 see this and do something about it?”
I had to say that people who are doing well tend to relate senior poverty to the old fable about the squirrel and the grasshopper:
We think everyone had a choice; that some were squirrels who stored nuts away every day and others were grasshoppers who sang all day in the sun and are now suffering for it in their senior years. However, the Social Planning report demonstrates that for many of us, inequity is built-in our system.
In an earlier e-blast, I suggested we use this pandemic as a disrupter — an opportunity to design our economic recovery in a new way to solve our social ills. Senior poverty is one of those ills.
It's true we need to rebuild our long-term care system, but we also need to provide affordable housing to help our aging population cope on their own. Every Canadian should be demanding that earnings-based employee pension programs be far more prevalent in our economy.
Part of the reason "The 1%" have been able to accumulate so much of the world’s wealth is because they have been allowed to walk away from providing benefits to their employees. This is the most false economy of them all.
We should remember to be kind to those who are struggling, but we should also learn from them and advocate for change. Social Planning Toronto and Well Living House recommend both short and long-term solutions for all levels of government — and I’m going to use these as my own personal starting point.
Comments