In Canada, governments provide seniors with a spectrum of income supports and programs intended to maintain a baseline standard of living in retirement. For many years, the social safety net has been praised for producing lower poverty rates for seniors, as measured by the Market Basket Measure (MBM), Canada’s Official Poverty Line. However, our understanding of seniors’ income adequacy is often based on long-held assumptions about what an adequate life looks like in retirement and on “adequacy measures” that do not necessarily reflect the experiences of seniors. In this report, we explore the question: Are we accurately measuring seniors’ income adequacy, and if not, how can we do better?
An Analysis of the Economic Circumstances of Canadian Seniors
