Budget 2015: Recommendations to the

Inadequate retirement savings, precarious late-career employment, and poor investor protection combine to make it difficult for many Canadians to achieve and sustain retirement income security. Nearly 6 percent of seniors still live in poverty, amounting to almost 300,000 people.i One in six single seniors, most of whom are women, lives in poverty. Twelve million working Canadians do not have workplace pension plans and Canadians are increasingly unable to save sufficiently for their own retirement.ii The 2015 budget is an opportunity for the federal government to help older Canadians achieve financial security and prepare for retirement. CARP recommends that the federal government: 1. Lead the way on comprehensive pension reform, retirement security, and poverty reduction: Work with provinces to create a national supplementary Universal Pension Plan (UPP) with reliable, predictable benefits and enact a modest CPP enhancement. Eliminate mandatory minimum withdrawals from Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs) Commit to funding the replacement of the OAS and GIS benefits that will be lost by the most financially vulnerable seniors because of the changes to OAS, as a first step to restoring the OAS eligibility age to 65