Canadian seniors are wealthier than ever. Do seniors' discounts still make sense?

Whether she's attending a chamber performance or playing in one, cellist and teacher Laura Backstrom says one thing is pretty consistent — the audience "looks like a sea of white hair," she says.

In contemplating why that is, Backstrom, 60, said she initially thought it was because seniors have "a need for music in their life and they have the time for it and they have the resources." 

But lately, her thinking has changed, she told Cost of Living. Now she wonders if audience demographics could have something to do with who gets a discount and who pays full freight.

While seniors enjoy healthy discounts on many event and entertainment tickets, those deals aren't extended to all potential attendees, she said. "There are people who maybe have a couple of kids and they find that getting a babysitter and paying for that just puts it over the top and out of reach for them." 

While few would suggest any older person should struggle financially, the higher incidence of poverty in younger groups has some Canadians wondering whether seniors should be the group to enjoy the most discounts on everything from bus fare to entertainment.

There are valid concerns about seniors living in poverty but statistics show that cohort is not the hardest up in Canada. Six per cent of Canadians aged 65 and older are classed as low-income, compared to 11.1 per cent of all other adults, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data.

The data, from 2022, also shows that single people in their senior years are four times more likely to experience poverty than seniors who live with a partner or family.

But even among that more vulnerable group of single seniors, of which many are women, only about 14 per cent live in poverty compared to 31 per cent of single people in every other age group, Statistics Canada says.

Backstrom qualifies for a discount at her local recreation centre in Victoria, and she thinks that may be misguided, too. "For a three-month pass, a senior is $95, an adult is $120. That's quite a big difference. With mortgage payments being super high for a lot of young families, that might just really put it out of reach."

The demographics of Canada's poorest have changed considerably since senior discounts became common starting in the 1960s, said Harry Kitchen, a professor emeritus of economics from Trent University who has studied these discounts.

"At that time, a lot of retired people were very poor. A lot of them had worked in jobs where there wasn't a pension income or not a very good pension income, and they hadn't saved," said Kitchen. "When they retired, they really didn't have much income to live on."

The first Canada Pension Plan pensions started on Jan. 1, 1967, but full pensions weren't available until 1976. Guaranteed Income Supplement payments started in 1967. 

The 2021 census showed that poverty dropped "fairly dramatically" across all age groups since the 2016 census, said Kitchen, who lives in Peterborough, Ont.

But the breakdown of who is and isn't poor continued a trend that had already been present for years, with high incidences of poverty among people 25 to 55. That group encompasses a lot of single-parent families or people working two or three jobs to make ends meet, he said.