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The answer is just about everyone. Poverty for seniors is roughly half what it is for the general population.

The genius of this government’s social policy is that it has played on an inherent bias in the media. Not the tired old trope about journalists all being lefties. Some are. Most would boil their grandmothers down for glue for a story. But there is an inherent bias in covering the expenditure of billions of taxpayers’ dollars because, while it’s easy to illustrate the impact of increased spending on seniors or children, it is almost impossible to trace those taxes back to their source and explain alternative uses for that money.

The data from the 2016 Census suggests the “crisis” the Liberals sought to solve in the 2015 election didn’t really exist. Trudeau’s mandate letter to Duclos urged him to “provide more direct help to those who need it,” particularly “the struggling middle class.”

But the data shows this was a political construct designed to siphon votes from people who, while they may have felt themselves under pressure, were better off across the board than a decade prior.

Using the low income cut-off after-tax threshold (below which people would have to devote a larger share of their income than average to necessities like food, shelter and clothing), the census showed the number of poor seniors across Canada had declined from 6.7 per cent in 2005 to 5.1 per cent 10 years later. The proportion of 18-to-64-year-olds beneath the LICO threshold also fell — from 11.7 per cent to 9.9 per cent — but in percentage terms that was still double the number of poor seniors.