Everyone benefits from an expanded Seniors’ Tax Credit

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In Ontario, a coalition of actual property, well being and senior care associations are advocating for the enhancement of the province’s Seniors’ Care at Home Tax Credit, recognizing the worth and societal advantages of giving seniors their very own dwelling selections.

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Let’s have a look at how properly this has labored in our neighbouring province, Quebec.

Since its introduction greater than 20 years in the past, Quebec’s Tax Credit score for Residence-Assist Providers for Seniors has confirmed extremely efficient in serving to seniors stay of their communities, easing the pressure on long-term care (LTC) beds, decreasing hospital admissions, and expediting the return dwelling from hospitals when a senior affected person is able to be discharged. Enhanced by politicians of each stripe through the years, Quebec’s program has diminished the waitlist for publicly funded LTC beds down to three,700, lower than one sixth of Ontario’s waitlist (adjusted for inhabitants).

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Based mostly on the latest out there information from 2020, implementing a tax credit score program in Ontario much like Quebec’s would initially price the federal government $489 million in foregone tax income. Nonetheless, this might be greater than offset by not less than $288 million in annual financial savings from diminished hospital and LTC admissions, financial savings from delayed healthcare entry, and decrease healthcare demand.

The online profit is plain: vital long-term financial savings for Ontario and improved look after Ontario seniors.

Supporting seniors shifting into properties that match their present wants not solely improves their high quality of life but additionally creates optimistic outcomes for the broader neighborhood. Many seniors stay in properties that not match their wants, usually because of the monetary and logistical boundaries of shifting. In actual fact, 29 per cent of senior singles and {couples} in Canada stay in properties with three or extra bedrooms. Whereas choices for downsizing — similar to senior residences, naturally occurring retirement communities, and licensed retirement properties — do exist, the provision is restricted, and demand is anticipated to surge within the coming a long time. Building of recent housing has slowed, pushed by rising labour and materials prices, and excessive native charges, prices and taxes.

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Governments can play a key position in making downsizing extra financially viable by providing focused incentives similar to a tax credit score, which make it simpler for seniors to maneuver with out being burdened by prices. Prices may embrace shifting bills or a proportion of lease in purpose-built seniors’ housing.

This may additionally encourage the non-public sector to construct extra purpose-built seniors’ housing for these seniors wishing to downsize. This, in flip, would have a optimistic cascading influence on our housing provide by releasing up single household properties, thereby additional assuaging strain on Ontario’s present housing system, whereas additionally presenting alternatives for mild densification by the potential conversion of those properties into multiplex housing.

Michael Brooks is the CEO of Realpac (Actual Property Affiliation of Canada), a 54-year-old nationwide affiliation of institutional actual property homeowners of all asset courses, having roughly $1 trillion of property beneath administration.

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