Changing Income Inequality and the Elderly in Canada 1991-1996: Provincial Metropolitan and Local Dimensions

Recently, much attention has been given to income inequality in industrialized societies, in part because of the empirical evidence linking high levels of income inequality with high mortality, morbidity and other social ills (Wilkinson, 1996). Analyses of these relations originally focused on national figures, but more recent work has explored these linkages at subnational scales -- for state, provincial and metropolitan entities. At the same time, other studies have documented the recent increases in income inequality during the 1990s in Canada, which raises further questions about the dynamics of the relation between income inequality and its social consequences. In this paper we explore additional dimensions of the structure and change of income inequality in Canada between 1991 and 1996. We examine changing income inequality for the population over 65 as well as for the population as a whole, demonstrating that increases in income inequality are concentrated among those in the labour force years and that there has been little change (even some decline) in income inequality among the elderly. From a geographical perspective, increasing income inequality is significantly a large metropolitan issue and, as such, has a lesser impact on seniors as seniors are relatively more concentrated in smaller urban and rural areas. The fact that income inequality can change quite rapidly at the small area level raises some questions about the links to population health. Population health tends to be cumulative and reflects longer term rather than short-term circumstances. The empirical linkages need significantly more exploration to assess the mechanisms which underlie the observed relationships.