Agist society or not

Key messages we want to use to stop ageism in our community  A strong message from Maddy at Home

·       Ageism is all around us.

·      All older people are different but ageism assumes that growing older is the same experience for everyone.

·      We must question ageism and how older people are often stereotyped in a certain way because of their age.

·      We live in a world where older people’s rights are denied. This must change! 

·      We live in an ageing world. Don’t let it be an ageist one.

·       Ageism leads to age discrimination, which, like all discrimination, legitimises and sustains inequalities.

·       Describing or depicting older age as something to resist or even delay reinforces ageist stereotypes and suggests living longer is a negative experience for everyone.

·      Ageism puts unnecessary pressures on ourselves to achieve certain goals at a certain time in our lives before we are deemed “too old” to do them.

·       No one can get younger but we can live in a world where living longer is celebrated and not dreaded.

·       Let’s begin to appreciate our diversity throughout our whole lives including in later age\

Agism

We were at the local football game and my friend asked me if I had noticed an increase in resentment about retired people coming back to work,as teachers on call or part time. I said that I had not, but I also reminded him that had not actually worked for the past three years. 

He indicated that he had noticed this and had been told by one of the people he had been working for, that he would not be called in for this person again. My friend asked why and the person, who was a department head, said, "Because you are retired and I want to give a younger person a chance".

My friend had known this person for about 10 years, and was upset, but he decided that he was not going to pursue the issue, because he too had decided that he would leave his profession.

I told him, he should have made this an issue, the department head was discriminating against my friend and others, because of their age.  The is protection against this type of discrimination in the union contract and in our professional code of ethics and the employer in BC, also has policy against this form of discrimination. The problem is that this person and others do not realize that they are discriminating. 

The only way to help them learn is to point it out to them and if they do not change, to report them.   The problem is my friend is in a speciality area and if he is not called in then then there may be no-one called in and other teachers will lose their prep time when called on to cover the class, and/or a teacher with no background in the speciality will be called in and the students will be doing nothing. Older teachers and I suspect older workers everywhere, are being asked back or they are coming back because they have expertise that is needed by the employer that the young have not yet learned.

We cannot change what people think about us old folks, but we can change what they say and what they do.

Wealth and seniors two views

Two different views on wealth amongst seniors, one from an academic, right view, drawing on stats and information that is current to 2006. The past ten years have changed the landscape but this is ignored in the first report. The second is from the BC Senior’s Advocate which highlights the reality of seniors in BC.

There is a tendency to view seniors as a vulnerable population”, write Lee and Speer. “The facts tell a different story”. Ian Lee teaches strategic management at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, and Sean Speer is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Of course, the authors aren’t actually proposing a Seniors Tax. Instead they are attempting to highlight the contradictions of federal policy by taking arbitrary and vague concepts like fairness to their logical conclusion.

Not only are seniors wealthier than younger Canadians, they are the disproportionate beneficiaries of government programs and spending. A Seniors Tax would therefore go a long way to offset the “reverse ageism” – that is, a bias in favour of older rather than younger Canadians – inherent in government spending and taxation policy.

It was only a few decades ago that Canadian seniors fared poorly relative to seniors in other countries according to key indicators such as income replacement, accumulated wealth and poverty rates. But that is not the case now. Consider that:

• Canadian seniors’ wealth has grown much faster than younger Canadians', nearly quadrupling since 198
•  Incidence of low income among seniors fell from 21.3 percent to 5.4 percent between 1980 and 2006.
• The federal government is increasing spending on seniors at a rate of $12 billion per year.
•  Canada has been ranked as one of the least “intergenerational just” jurisdictions in the world.
• The evidence would thus suggest that the government’s redistributionism should have focused on transferring income and wealth from seniors to younger Canadians.

Instead, Ottawa doubled down on helping out seniors in its most recent budget! Returning the Old Age Security eligibility age to 65 will add significant cost over the long term for a group that barely needs it.

Another point of view:

There is no denying that many seniors in this country are thoroughly enjoying life on middle or high incomes, but this is true in the population at large as well.  

In fact, looking at the objective data of Statistics Canada, the median household income for seniors is in fact the lowest of any age cohort over the age of 25.  In Canada, single people over 65 have a median income of $26,000 (StatsCan 2013 Canadian Income Survey).  

This means that fully half of single Canadian seniors are living on less than $26,000 a year.

These are 26% of single seniors in British Columbia who are living in poverty. These are people who have no expectation of increases in income with new jobs, no mobility to move to more affordable rental markets (20% of seniors in BC are renters) and 35% do not live in urban areas where house values provide potential significant equity to access. Some may question entitlements offered to seniors based solely on their age with no consideration of income.  However, in fact, almost all government subsidized entitlements for seniors are income tested.

The social spending bias against seniors continues to be expressed by other media and some academics who cherry-pick data and offer gross generalizations that take the economic conditions of some seniors and apply it to all seniors. Perhaps the most offensive part of these often hyperbole laced arguments is when medical costs are considered.  The argument above advance is that we should be counting the money we spend on fixing hips, knees and hearts as part of looking at government expenditures on seniors, and lump it in with OAS and cinema discounts to conclude that we spend disproportionately more on seniors than the population under 65 on a per capita basis. 

Not to let facts get in the way of a good story, but we could slice out any number of discrete populations and show similar healthcare dollar disparities. Conveniently missing from the conversation on health care costs for seniors is the value of the contribution that seniors make to caring for their spouses. 

Before we go blaming seniors for the fact they need a new hip or bypass surgery, we should first thank them for the billions, yes billions of dollars they save the health care system by taking care of each other. 

Indeed I find it hard to believe that those who support these arguments have spent any time with seniors living in residential care or receiving home care – the flip side of seniors on the tennis courts and golf courses of Toronto.

It will be very difficult to have a rational adult conversation if we keep trying to whip up generational warfare with incendiary statements such as one generation is “robbing” the other of their future. 

Currently seniors represent about 17% of Canada’s population and this is expected to rise to about 24% by the year 2031 at which point it will stabilize.  By any estimation 24% is a minority of the population. Please let us give the respect to this minority that we would give to any other when we are discussing needs and entitlements, in other words, let us remain Canadian in our discourse.

Who are you?

If asked that question 10 years ago, I had a number of answers, but the one I liked the best was I am a teacher in Surrey. When I retired I no longer felt I could answer the question. 

We are social animals and part of are connectedness to others is knowing who we are, and what we have to contribute to the greater good. 

Once you are retired, the odds are that you will have trouble finding an answer to the question: "Who are you?" This loss of status is harder for men than for women, and it has taken me years to find an answer that I am comfortable with and the answer I have know is I am an educator and I have always been a learner. 

We are social beings and we need to keep connected to others and the quality and number of connections you have with others in your social circle including family, friends, neighbours and acquaintances, helps keep us healthy in retirement. Other terms used for this need are social support, social capital and social engagement. At a very basic level, being socially active brings enjoyment and meaning to your life.

Consequently, you experience an upswing in your overall quality of life and well-being. Part of the connection we have is how we define our role, and that means how we define ourselves. Who are you, or who you think you are plays an important role in determining how or if you will interact with others.

Although social connectedness plays a significant role in health, we as seniors or boomers are more likely than any other age group to feel lonely or isolated. This social isolation is defined as less social contact than someone wishes, causing loneliness or other emotional distress. In “normal” aging, a our social circle may grow smaller due to:

• Illness or disability
• Loss of spouse or friends – more than 6% of Canadians over the age of 65 reported not having any friends
• Caregiver responsibilities
• Poverty
• Lack of personal hygiene 

For seniors, social exclusion is found in several forms: 

• Exclusion from society due to laws or societal discrimination (e.g. mandatory retirement)
• Failure of society to provide for the needs of seniors (e.g. affordable housing)
• Denial of opportunities to contribute and participate actively in society (e.g. not being represented on a community planning committee)
• Economic exclusion (e.g. unequal or lack of access to resources)

One of the barriers to social connectedness for seniors is discrimination based on society’s negative attitudes and stereotypes about aging. This is a problem, because agism is hidden and most people deny they discriminate based on age, but ask any of us who have white hair and look old, we experience this discrimination.

Social exclusion is the inability for certain groups or individuals to participate fully in Canadian life due to inequalities in accessing social, economic, political and cultural resources.