Social conditions and pressures associated with city living cause particular challenges for older people given fixed incomes, life course needs (e.g., living alone, mobility issues, need for care), and reductions to essential public supports. The proposed study explores older people’s everyday experiences of poverty and low income in the urban contexts of Toronto and Montreal, Canada’s two largest cities. In Canada, a country where federal, provincial, and municipalities share responsibilities to tackle poverty, governmental authorities typically utilize a range of economic measures such as the Low Income Cut-Offs (LICO) and the Market Basket Measure (MBM) in their analyses. This project aims to understand and broaden existing measures and responses to poverty based on the experiences of older people in the context of their everyday lives, specifically as related to housing, transportation, and memory loss. Drawing on critical gerontology, our investigative methods include: a) a review of definitions and foundational knowledge about ‘ what counts as poverty ’ in policy frameworks and the academic literature; b) a policy review and document analysis of National (Canada), provincial (Ontario/Quebec) and municipal (Toronto/Montreal) strategies on poverty and aging; c) three targeted comparative case studies comprised of onsite ethnographic observations and ‘go along methods’; key informant interviews; and in-depth interviews with older people in Toronto and Montreal. The expected outcome is a better understanding of everyday experiences of poverty among older people at the micro level of experience, the meso-level of community practice, and the macro level of social programming and policy.
Grenier et al. (Mon,) studied this question.