Seniors Who Must Keep Working

Not all seniors have any retirement and must continue working

On CBC Radio it was sad to hear 67-year-old seniors must continue to work in order to pay the bills.

The program The Current interviewed two people, Stephen Booth who is in Barrie, Ontario, and Janis Long in Langley, British Columbia.

Booth was thrown a curveball when he was 55 years old, his health got so bad that he was in a wheelchair, lost his driver's license and eventually had to quit his regular job, though he doesn't say what it was. As a result he and his wife had to sell their house and he now works part time at Walmart.

It's tough for him to work with a basket of illnesses, including being legally blind, deaf, and has Parkinson's.

As the deacon in the Catholic Church, he has some close friends in the parish who will drop off the occasional gift card to help him keep going financially.

Meanwhile Long says she's been by herself for the past 25 years and has always worked. She also took in her mother and looked after her for the last eight years of her life. Long had to quit working because her mother had dementia and had to look after her.

Her job is ironically looking after some 40 seniors in a day program. She finds it exhausting and has arthritis in her hands so she worries how much longer she can do the job. Luckily Long has a very affordable rent compared to her friends, but still finds it hard to afford basic necessities.

Long used to be a competitive bowler and wasn't able to afford continuing her favourite hobby until her son stepped up to pay for her year of bowling.

She feels bad that he does that, as she thinks her children shouldn't have to pay for that, that they should only treat her for Mother's Day, birthdays and Christmas.

Last January her car was carjacked while she was delivering the newspapers in the middle of the night. Her car was taken along with her purse with everything in it. She managed to get money to replace the car from her insurance, and around that time her friend stopped driving so she bought it for C$10,000. 

She says if she had car payments now Long half jokingly said she wouldn't be eating.

It's sad to hear seniors aren't able to enjoy the last decades of their lives. How did we get to this point? As a man who is around 35 pointed out last week on a radio call-in show about housing that he and his partner still don't have a home and wonder if they will ever be able to afford it. What are they going to do when they get into their 60s?