Cost of Basic Needs for the Canadian Elderly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper determines the after-tax income required to finance the basic needs for Canadian seniors living in different circumstances in terms of age, gender, city of residence, household size, homeowner or renter, means of transportation and health status. Using 2001 as our base year, we price the typical expenses for food, shelter, medical, long-term care, transportation and miscellaneous basic living items for seniors living in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Such information is important for seniors, prospective retirees, financial planners, policy makers and actuaries in assessing the minimum level of income required in retirement and the adequacy of savings and income security programs. The objectives of our study were embodied in the recently developed US Elder Economic Security Standard, and this measure provided the foundation for our conceptional framework. Our project is unique because it is the first Canadian study of basic living expenses tailored to seniors rather than simply to adults in general, prepared on an absolute rather than a relative basis. We also uniquely account for an individual’s life circumstances, as listed above, rather than simply their city of residence and household size. Our study establishes the wide varying effect and immense impact that the life circumstances of seniors have on the cost of their basic needs. Our results suggest that the total living cost for an elderly person is near to, or even higher than, that for a non-elderly adult. This conclusion is in opposition to the commonly held belief that retired seniors automatically have fewer expenses than working non-seniors. Of particular importance is the immense cost of long-term health care assistance, a potential necessary expense that previous Canadian measures have not considered. Finally, the threshold for a Canadian senior with typical circumstances and that for a 1 Canadian in poor circumstances are at approximately the same levels, and the combined maximum GIS and OAS benefits do not meet the cost of basic needs for these latter seniors, except in Montreal where the rental prices are comparatively low. 1
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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 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".