Reforming Old Age Security: A Good Start But Incomplete
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2012, the federal government implemented changes to Old Age Security (OAS), one of three key income programs for seniors. While the main reform — an increase in the age of eligibility — is a positive first step in reforming programs for seniors in the face of historic demographic change, it is only a first step.The most prominent reform announced in the 2012 Budget concerning OAS is an increase in the age of eligibility to receive full OAS benefits. The announced changes will not affect anyone born before March 1958. Specifically, the age of eligibility will be increased to 67 years of age from its current level of 65 years of age starting in 2023, with the change fully implemented by January 2029.It is worth noting the modest nature of the two year increase in the age of eligibility. Consider that every year that life expectancy increases, the total benefits paid under senior programs also increase but without any specific action on the part of the government. In other words, these benefit increases occur automatically as a function of increases in life expectancy. If, however, the government had indexed the age of eligibility to life expectancy in say 1966, when the CPP was introduced, the age of eligibility for OAS today would be 74 years of age.While the federal government should be applauded for its willingness to tackle a sensitive and controversial issue, the changes made to OAS are a first step in what needs to be a much larger process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".