ENSURING A MORE SECURE RETIREMENT FOR OUR SENIORS
After a lifetime of hard work, Canada’s seniors have earned a secure and dignified retirement. They deserve a retirement filled with family and friends, not financial worries. We will continue to move forward with investments that give our seniors a better quality of life, with stronger supports to help make ends meet – especially for our most vulnerable seniors here in Central Nova.
More Generous Support for Seniors
We will make life more affordable for people as they age, with more generous support for seniors and widows.
Canadians are living longer than ever before, but today’s seniors are also facing rising health care costs, and the number of seniors who rely on monthly benefits to make ends meet rises as seniors age. Even though as many as 238,000 seniors continue to live in poverty, Andrew Scheer voted against lowering the eligibility age for Old Age Security from 67 to 65.
We moved forward with this change because we know it boosts seniors’ retirement savings by thousands of dollars and lets them retire earlier, so they can spend more time with their family and friends.
To make life more affordable for people as they age, we will move forward with increasing the Old Age Security benefit by 10 per cent for seniors when they turn 75, and will continue to raise it along with inflation. This will help to lift more than 20,000 seniors out of poverty – two-thirds of whom are women – and will give greater financial security to more than three million seniors every year.
For most seniors, it will mean up to $729 in additional financial help every year once they turn 75. We will also move forward with more help for seniors who have lost their partners. Most often, the surviving partners are women. We will work with the provinces and territories to give even more support to survivors, by increasing the Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan survivor’s benefit by 25 per cent. This increase, worth up to $2,080 in additional benefits every year, will give more than 1.2 million seniors more money and greater peace of mind at a time when they need it most.