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As recently as 40 years ago, old age meant living in poverty for more than a third of Canadian seniors. Thankfully, public programs like the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement changed this, cutting B.C.’s seniors’ poverty rate to a low of 2.2 per cent in the mid-1990s, among the lowest in the Western world.

Instead of building on this social-policy success, however, we have let it lapse, and seniors’ poverty rates are on the rise again — now 13 per cent. Nearly 100,000 B.C. seniors were living below the poverty line in 2014 (the latest data available), and many more have incomes only marginally above the line.

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The challenges faced by these seniors are largely invisible. We tend to think of seniors as a homogeneous group of well-off retirees, but such generalizations ignore a bigger picture of deep income and wealth inequality across generations.

While most seniors (particularly those living with their spouse) are doing OK, a disturbingly large number of single seniors — 44 per cent — have incomes between $15,000 and $25,000 a year. Many of them aren’t technically considered in poverty, but they struggle to cover basic living expenses and pay for the additional costs that come with declining health, reduced mobility and loss of spousal and community support in older age.