Once one of the Western world’s youngest societies, Quebec will rapidly become one of its oldest over the next thirty years.  Never will there have been, in absolute and relative numbers, as many Quebecers in the last season of their lives. For the government of Quebec, this represents both an enormous challenge, but also an opportunity to innovate and adapt.  The Quebec Liberal Party saw the babyboom coming in the 1960’s and dealt with it.  It will do likewise for the upcoming seniors boom. It is no coincidence that Jean Charest was the first to appoint a Cabinet Minister for Seniors.

While seniors coping with a diminished autonomy certainly deserve our efficient compassion and support, this should not obscure the fact that the vast majority of seniors are healthy, mobile and active. They take care of themselves, their homes and their loved ones, and they do a vast amount of volunteer work and interaction with the young ones. Many of them still work, enjoy it and would like to stay on the labour market a while longer and transmit their know-how to the next generation, if only our legislation and tax laws would stop discouraging such a choice.

While it is significant in the long term that the Quebec birth rate finally seems to have turned the corner in the past three years, population ageing is here to stay, and we need to adapt to it.  In practical terms, this means helping seniors maintain decent incomes, preserving their access to healthcare and drugs, making it easier for them to move around, recognize and support their volunteer work and doing all we can to make sure they can live at home as long as possible, near services, care and loved ones.  This is why the Liberal government has established the “Senior-Friendly Cities” program, and invested considerable resources into homecare, an area where spending progressed twice as fast as overall healthcare spending over the last 7 years.

Since 2003, the Charest government has acted on many fronts to improve living conditions for Quebec seniors:

A thorough simplification of the various tax credits and more resources invested into adapting dwellings and providing support to caregivers, in addition to new tax rules allowing retirement income splitting among senior spouses;

Changes to the Civil Code to guarantee grand-parents to right of access to their grand-children; An action plan to prevent abuse and mistreatment of seniors;

An upcoming action plan making progressive retirement more appealing than early retirement;

The construction, planned or already completed, of 30 000 new units of social housing;

The introduction of free drugs for seniors on low income.