The French public is fiercely opposed to the recent change in retirement age.Many young people are against raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.
It’s unfair, but unavoidable – even in Canada. Our retirement age of 65 is five years shorter than he was when Ottawa launched Old Age Security (OAS) in 1952, but life expectancy increased by 14 years during the same period. I’m here. It’s time to strengthen the pension system, considering possible win-win trade-offs.
Longer retirement periods are one reason government budgets are under enormous demographic pressure. Her OAS-paying adults of all retirees are now her 3.3, compared to her 6.9 when baby boomers started working.
In 2012, the Harper administration planned to slowly raise the OAS eligibility age to 67. The Trudeau administration won his 2015 election and thwarted that plan.
This was good politics, but bad policy. Especially since Canadians don’t like paying more taxes to help with living expenses after retirement. There is no escaping the fact that dramatic increases in life expectancy will require adjustments in retirement age.
When raising, policies will also need to adapt to other key demographic trends, such as an increase in dual-income households.
The definition of full-time work under the Employment Standards reflects the assumption that households have one breadwinner and one professional caregiver and domestic worker. Most homes no longer operate this way. One reason is feminism, but another is that rent hasn’t kept up with housing costs. Canadians under the age of 45 generally rely on her two breadwinners to carve out a standard of living that still lags behind what her one breadwinner was often able to achieve a generation ago. is required.
With more dual-income households, a full-time job no longer has to mean more than 40 hours a week or 49-50 weeks a year. This employment standard, established after World War II, has caused significant pressure on time at home, especially if workers have young children.
While the country upholds family values, Canada’s workplace standards have not materialized. A typical Canadian employee works 300 hours more each year than a typical German or Danish worker for about the same median income, and a typical employee in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France or even the UK working about 200 hours more than
It is inevitable that young Canadians will have to reluctantly accept a later retirement age, so let’s hope they do this in exchange for employment norms that accommodate dual-income families. As the work experiment shows, we need to play around with the definition of full-time work.
It could be as simple as adjusting your full-time baseline to 35 hours a week instead of 40. .
The government will address this by adjusting employer-paid overtime and EI premiums to reduce costs when employees are employed up to 35 hours a week and to increase costs beyond that. You can carry out your plan.
For employers, the switch will increase productivity. Twenty years before her, France moved to a 35-hour workweek in an effort to reduce unemployment. Since then, data has shown that the reduction in hours did not contribute much to this end, as employers did not fill a very large portion of the hours saved with new workers. It didn’t need to because it made me more productive.
Some Canadian employees trade a small amount of after-tax earnings (or a future raise) for four weeks of free time each year. In negotiations with employers, this time can be taken in chunks of additional vacation days or as a reduction in weekly working hours throughout the year.
Changes to Canada’s child benefits may ensure that reduced employment hours do not reduce income for low-income families, especially single parents. Combined with $10 a day childcare, families with young children will typically find their after-tax earnings to be the same or higher.
In return for delaying retirement from age 65 to age 67.
Paul Kershaw is a professor of policy at UBC, generation squeeze, Canada’s leading voice for intergenerational equity. You can follow Gen Squeeze twitter and Facebook Subscribe to Dr. Kershaw’s hard truth podcast.
