John Anderson

The Canadian Income Survey was released for 2012 by Statcan on Dec. 10, 2014. It shows again that overall poverty in Canada is still far too high at 13.8% of the population at the after tax Low Income Measure or including all government transfers.The highest poverty rate is for persons in female lone parent families where it reaches an astounding 44.5%!

For seniors, the news is also not nearly good enough. In spite of all the declarations of how poverty is over for seniors, 12.1% are in poverty or very near the Canadian overall rate. For two or more seniors in an economic family, the rate is 6.2% which at first hearing sounds not bad. But when we look into the figures, we see that the median income is only $56,500 before tax for married couples. This means half of senior couples are earning less than this!  The worse news in all  this data for seniors is the rate for single seniors which is an astounding 28.5%! This means almost one in 3 seniors living alone is in poverty. As we know by demographic statistics, most of these seniors living alone are female which shows how the pension system has failed seniors and particularly women.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/141210/dq141210a-eng.htm