Similar to child benefits, Canadian elderly benefits are broadly categorized into two types, direct payments and indirect payments.
1
Directly to the money: the old age pension (OAS)
This old age pension is relatively simple, the main condition is that the old on the line. 65 years of age, Canada's elderly people can begin to apply for a monthly old age pension. This year's cap is $578.53 per month.
Not everyone in Canada can get this cap. The pension mechanism requires that a person must have lived in Canada for at least 40 years after the age of 18 and before the age of 65 in order to receive the full amount of the pension. For each year of less residency, the number of benefits must be reduced proportionately. In addition, you must have lived in Canada for at least 10 consecutive years prior to age 65, and if that's not consecutive enough, you'll need to use three years of your previous residence to offset each missing year. If you want to get more or less of the old age pension, you must also have lived in Canada for at least 10 years after age 18.
The OAS is essentially a policy that subsidizes the poor and discriminates against the rich. If retirement income after age 65 is too high, OAS is reduced accordingly. When retirement pre-tax income reaches 119,615, this old age pension disappears altogether.
2
Indirectly giving money: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP)
This benefit, in essence, is where people who work give money and people who retire take money. The earliest a person who takes money can start taking it is age 60, but the policy age is 65, and the latest age to start taking it is 70.The maximum amount you can take at age 65 in 2017 was $1,114.17/month, and that amount goes down permanently by 0.6% for every month you take it earlier than 65, and goes up permanently by 0.7% for every month you delay taking it.
Unlike the RESP above, however, the CPP is not an indirect benefit that is voluntarily paid, but a mandatory benefit.
Everyone who works in Canada, as long as they take in something other than cash income, then they must pay a CPP contribution every single year. This contribution is a fixed percentage of annual income and is capped. Everyone simply interprets the CPP contribution as a tax payment, and the CPP withdrawal as a tax refund.
In fact, even for native-born Canadians, it is very difficult to get the full amount of CPP ($1,114.17). That's because to get the full CPP benefit, a person must have worked in Canada for at least 40 years and then earned no less than the pre-tax income corresponding to the maximum contribution amount in each of those years.
Forty years of work plus a high income is not that easy to do, and is especially difficult for immigrants.
That's why the average CPP benefit, in 2017, was $685.11 per person per month, nearly half the maximum. And the CPP system is still essentially a system where people are putting money into it while people are taking money out of it, so e5a48de588b6e79fa5e9819331333431336132 with an aging population poses a big challenge for the future of the CPP as well.
Overall, Canada is a country with decent child, health and retirement benefits for those living there, but it's also true that government benefits alone are not enough.