An analysis of the economic circumstances of Canadian seniors /

The improvement in the income of seniors up to that point reflected the maturation of the Canada/Quebec pension plans and the retirement of more women who had participated in the labour force, yielding increased pension and CPP/QPP benefits. [...] The assumptions and calculations underlying the simulation results were prepared by Richard Shillington, and the responsibility for the use and interpretation of these data is entirely that of the authors. [...] In other sections, when assessing the poverty of seniors, we use the income of the “economic family,” which includes the income of other relatives. [...] The poverty gap is the total amount of money that would be needed to raise the incomes of all poor seniors to the LIM poverty line— ignoring any behavioural impacts of the transfer programs used to achieve that goal.26 That gap can be estimated using Statistics Canada’s data on the number of persons in low-income households and the average gap between their incomes and the poverty line. [...] The change in the number of poor is a limited measure of the impact of increasing the GIS benefit rates.