Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation.
Seniors Action Quebec is an advocacy organization advocating on behalf of English-speaking seniors in Quebec. There are just over a million English speakers in Quebec, so about 13% of the Quebec population. Of that million, just under 160,000 are 65-plus, so it's a sizeable number of people who are English-speaking and 65-plus. If you lower the age criteria to 55, then there are about 260,000, or roughly 25% of the English-speaking population in Quebec that is 55 and over. Of the 160,000 English speakers who are 65-plus, 52% are women and 48% are men. In part, this reflects the fact that, on average, women live longer than men.
The information I'm presenting to you now came from a project that Seniors Action Quebec conducted from 2016 to 2018, funded by ESDC, that was focused on reaching socially isolated seniors and English-speaking seniors in Quebec. A researcher helped us look at some of the data about English-speaking seniors, and this has helped us isolate some information that we think helps highlight the situation of women who are English-speaking seniors.
Of the 160,000 who are 65-plus, we learned that about 30% are living alone. We were looking for indicators of social isolation, and living alone is not an automatic indicator, but it's one of them. What was interesting about the roughly 46,000 seniors living alone was that 37% of all 65-plus women lived alone, whereas 20% of the men did. Therefore, more senior English-speaking women are living alone than men. I don't know exactly why that is, but as I mentioned, living alone is one potential indicator of social isolation. More senior women are living alone than men.
Secondly, we were pretty shocked, actually, to see the size of the senior English-speaking population that was living on $20,000 a year or less, and even more surprised to see that almost twice as many women were living on or under $20,000 than men. Probably, part of that was related to their past non-participation in the workforce and less access to pensions. It was a pretty surprising finding.
Lastly, you are probably familiar with the LICO indicator, which is an indicator of “straitened circumstances”—that's what the literature calls it—but a much more restrained annual income. There are 18% of women 65-plus who are living under LICO. In general, senior English-speaking women are not doing as well financially as their male counterparts.
The last slide summarizes the focus that we had on indicators of social isolation. It's not divided by gender, but repeats the information I presented. When you consider those indicators combined with any medical conditions, mobility limitations, lower implication in social and community life, and a weak or absent social safety net, those things will certainly contribute to social isolation. Women are more likely to have some of the indicators that, in combination with these other things, will amplify isolation.
I'm going to ask the executive director of Seniors Action Quebec, Vanessa Herrick, to continue to contribute some information about English-speaking seniors in Quebec.