From CBC:
Changes to the age of eligibility for Old Age Security will start in April 2023, rising gradually to age 67 from 65 by Feb. 1, 2029, affecting those born after April 1, 1958.
Wow. The Conservatives couldn’t send a clearer message that they have contempt for young, low-income Canadians if they walked around clubbing and skinning them.
It’s also just a brilliant symbol of inter-generational inequity. Retirement age goes up in 2029? Hooray! Another social rollback the baby boom generation won’t have to bear.
But okay, let’s calm down for a minute before plunging into the inevitable frenzy of anti-boomer outrage.
While there is demonstrable unfairness between the benefits that were available to boomers (cheap college education, high-wage public sector jobs, strong unions, good unemployment insurance, and the other social perks of life in a time before words like “austerity” were politically viable), and the benefits available to everyone younger (skyrocketing tuition fees, bum economy, fraying social safety net, collapsing pensions, degraded environment and destabilized climate), this isn’t as much about a generational gap as it is the same old divide between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Multi-millionaires are always the ones who benefit from slashing the public sector.
If the boomers are to be blamed, it should probably just be for not fighting quite hard enough for their kids. I don’t think they’re a malicious generation.
Then again, they got fat in the 1970s, then they voted in Mulroney, Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, all of whom have overseen the widening gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. Maybe boomers are a pack of total dicks*.
Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Canada’s finance minister (born 1949) has a good salary, a government pension and anyway, he might be dead by the time the retirement age goes to 67 (which wouldn’t affect him anyway).
As for Stephen Harper, he was born in 1959. Smoooth. Why, the changes will affect him too! He’s just like the rest of us!
Don’t tell me that guy doesn’t know politics.
*Except the boomers who read prairie dog. They’re not dicks. They’re awesome.
