Thank you very much, and thank you to the committee for inviting my testimony.
I am the seniors advocate for the Province of British Columbia. This is a statutory office of the provincial government with a legislated mandate to monitor services to seniors, undertake systemic reviews and make recommendations to government on how to improve supports and services for B.C. seniors. In addition to health care, housing and transportation, income support is also included within my mandate.
Currently, for the most part, it is the federal government that has assumed the role of providing an income for retired Canadians through the old age security, the guaranteed income supplement and the Canada pension plan.
I'm just going to give some quantification or numbers to some of the stories that previous speakers, like Laura, and speakers in previous sessions spoke to.
A Canadian retiree who is wholly dependent on their public pensions—meaning they're getting the average amount of CPP and getting a little bit of GIS and OAS—will have an annual income of $24,000 if they're 75 and under, or a little bit more than $25,000 if they're over 75.
If a senior has very little or no CPP, they'll receive the maximum GIS, and their total income will be $22,500 if they're under 75, or $23,400 if they're 75 and older.
I want to point out that in all cases, the income they will receive is well below the income of a person who's working at minimum wage in any territory or province in this country.
Most Canadian retirees do provide some private pension, either from their RRSP or their workplace pension, but the additional amount is very limited, as the overall median income—so 50% of seniors in this country—is very low.
In British Columbia, which mirrors Canada for the most part, the median income of a senior is $33,000. In our province, that is still below minimum wage, the rate at which 6% of the labour force is employed. Most stunningly, it is 65% lower than the median income of the working-age population aged 35 to 55.
Many have referred to the market-based measure of poverty, and Aiman did that as well. I would challenge that it is not the best tool to look at. Laura has spoken to some of the reasons why, but there's another reason, which is that it is a threshold where, if you're a dollar above it, you're off. When you look at seniors, they are very clustered around that poverty line. Therefore, it's counterintuitive that 7% of seniors live in poverty as defined by the market-based measure, but almost half of seniors are living on an income below minimum wage. I think that is something that is underestimated by a lot of policy-makers.
Using median incomes—not average, because they reflect a small group of higher income-earning seniors—is arguably a better measure of the actual poverty within our seniors population.
Those who have testified before me have spoken of the challenges that seniors are facing with the rising costs and with incomes that are not able to keep pace with inflation. Laura has told you the story of the senior in Ottawa, and the speakers in the session before me were also talking a lot about that.
My office does hear increasingly from seniors around affordability issues, most particularly food. For those who rent, it's the cost of rental housing, which is not surprising, given that B.C. is home to the most expensive housing market in the country.
We also do hear from a large number of seniors on dental care costs, which is why I'm so very pleased with the new federal dental plan, and I expect that this will address many of the concerns we've been hearing.
The stories we hear of seniors living with very limited incomes are, of course, very distressing. The numbers would indicate that these experiences are not only very real but being felt by a larger number of seniors than we might anticipate, particularly those two out of 10 seniors who are renters, not homeowners.
Obviously, I wholly support the provisions of Bill C-319 to raise the OAS for those aged 65 to 75 by 10%, for all of the reasons the previous speaker has spoken of, and I don't need to repeat those.
What I would do is further challenge the committee members to use their influence to look at including CPP in the earnings exemption.
In the previous session, one of your members spoke to providing an incentive for people over 65 who are able to work to continue to work. That's why we have the earnings exemption for GIS. That's true, and that's one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that we're penalizing those who can't work.
To put this in perspective, if I am 66 years of age, and if I defer my CPP and I earn $6,500 a year from employment, my total income will be $27,400. That's my OAS, my top GIS and my $6,500 in employment income.
If I am 72 years of age—
