TORONTO - One-third of Canada's senior and near-senior citizens are worried they'll outlive their bank accounts, and half of those over 60 holding jobs say they're working because they need the money, a new poll suggests as a record number of Canadians face the so-called golden years.
If projections hold true, Tuesday's census release on aging will reveal seniors, specifically those over 80, to be the fastest growing segment of Canada's population.
That trend will only grow in coming years, with the first of that demographic population bulge known as baby boomers having just recently turned 60.
So, what's on the mind of Canadian seniors? Finances, health and their continued independence, according to the poll by Decima Research provided exclusively to The Canadian Press.
While 44 per cent of respondents 60 and older said they were not worried about outliving their resources and assets, 33 per cent said they were.
When asked to agree or disagree with the statement: I have to work for financial reasons, 32 per cent agreed while 21 per cent strongly agreed.
One-third of respondents 60 and older said they were working either part-or full-time. Nineteen per cent indicated that their financial situation was worse or much worse than five years ago.
"The truth of the matter is, a lot of baby boomers and war-time babies have not adequately prepared for retirement," said Bill Gleberzon, spokesman for CARP, Canada's Association for the 50 Plus.
"Many of them, if you look at the amount they have actually stored away in their RSPs, among those who have RSPs. . .the amounts are around $60,000. That's certainly not going to get you through 30 or 40 years of your life after you retire."
Roughly 3.4 million Canadians were 65 or older in 2006, making up 13.3 per cent of the population, according to projections published by Statistics Canada last fall. An additional 1.6 million people were five years or less away from 65, and there were almost 1.2 million people 80 or older.
The first of the boomers, the generation born between 1947 and 1966, are turning 60 this year. While they're regarded as the most affluent group in Canadian history, society can expect to see an economic "division of the baby boom," said Prof. Doug Owram.
"There's going to be a group of baby boomers for whom all of this image of affluence and consumption isn't reality," said Owram, an historian with the University of British Columbia.
"Society is going to have to watch that side of things, otherwise they could find real social problems down the road."
One poll question that elicited a unified response from the majority of respondents centered on the worry they could lose their independence as they age.
Fifty-four per cent agreed that was a concern. Some 23 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed while 21 per cent said they weren't worried about losing their independence.
"That's certainly the No. 1 issue that came up in our consultations across Canada," said Anne Martin-Matthews, scientific director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
The institute spent two years conducting nationwide workshops on seniors' issues, during which talk about the housing-care continuum - namely how and where people will live as they age - was a dominant theme.
"When people talked about this housing-care continuum, they were really very much focused on that whole issue, it was all around independence and health services," said Martin-Matthews.
The Decima Research poll's results were based on 4,000 online respondents, aged 42 and over, conducted from March 25 to April 22, considered accurate to 1.6 percentage points, 9.5 times out of 10.
When it comes to the youngest Canadians, Statistics Canada reports there were 3.6 million children aged nine and younger, and only 1.7 million below the age of four in 2006.
If those projections hold true, Tuesday's census release should show that the over-80 crowd is the fastest growing segment of the population, with the under-four set shrinking the most rapidly.
The country's demographic landscape was characterized as having an "unprecedented demographic impact on Canadian society" in a government report submitted to the United Nations Commission for Social Development earlier this year.
The report noted that seniors will make up one-quarter of the population by 2036, and further predicted the decline in Canada's youth population will continue for the next 50 years.
