A widow er or common-law spouse aged 65 or older may receive a survivor's pension and an old-age or disability pension at the same time. The maximum benefit is not adjusted annually. Current laws: health , employment insurance , and Quebec maternity and parental benefits.
Type of program: Social insurance cash benefits and universal system medical benefits. Social insurance Employment Insurance EI , cash benefits : Employed persons, including federal government employees, and self-employed fishermen. Voluntary coverage for self-employed persons. After receiving cash benefits, coverage for self-employed persons is mandatory. Cash benefits special EI benefits include maternity, parental, sickness, compassionate care, and family caregiver benefits, Self-employed persons are not eligible for the regular EI program unemployment benefits.
Universal medical benefits : Residents of Canada. Coverage is portable when insured residents move from province to province and for emergency care anywhere in the world. In Quebec, an additional 0. Universal medical benefits : Pays premiums in British Columbia. Ontario has a health premium based on taxable income above a certain threshold. No premiums in the other provinces. For the voluntarily insured EI special benefits , see source of funds under Unemployment. Universal medical benefits : Contributions vary by province from no contribution to 4.
Universal medical benefits : The total cost is financed through the general revenues of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, except in those provinces where premiums are paid. Federal government makes contributions to provinces and territories through block transfers provinces and territories must meet the federal program requirements in the Canada Health Act.
Must have exhausted employer paid sick leave before applying for cash sickness benefits. The mother, the father, an adoptive parent, or both parents may be eligible for parental benefits. The mother, the father, or both parents may be eligible for parental benefits. Paternity benefits are paid only to the biological father.
The biological father can receive both paternity and parental benefits, but not simultaneously. Family Caregiver Benefit EI, social insurance : Must be absent from work to provide care or support for a critically ill or injured family member. The benefit was introduced in December If you will be in the other country for days or less, a certificate will not be needed unless the other country requests that you obtain one.
The request may be sent by FAX, if preferred, to Please note this FAX number is only for requesting certificates of coverage. No special form is required to request a certificate but the request must be in writing and provide the following information:.
In addition, your employer must indicate if you remain an employee of the U. If you become an employee of an affiliate, your employer must indicate if the U. Social Security taxes for U. Your employer can also request a certificate of U.
To establish your exemption from coverage under the U. Social Security system, your employer in Canada must request a certificate of coverage from Canada as follows:. The same information required for a certificate of coverage from the United States is needed to get a certificate of coverage from Canada or Quebec except that you must show your Canadian social insurance number rather than your U.
Social Security number. If you are self-employed and would normally have to pay Social Security taxes to both the U. The certificate of coverage you receive from one country will show the effective date of your exemption from paying Social Security taxes in the other country. Generally, this will be the date you began working in the other country. However, a self-employed person must attach a photocopy of the certificate to his or her income tax return each year as proof of the U.
Copies of certificates of coverage issued by the United States will be provided for both the employee and employer.
It will be their responsibility to present the certificate to the Canadian or Quebec authorities when requested to do so. To avoid any difficulties, your employer or you, if you are self-employed should request a certificate as early as possible, preferably before your work in the other country begins.
If you or your employer request a certificate of coverage, you should read the Privacy Act and Paperwork Reduction Act Statements below.
Authority to collect information for a certificate of coverage. The Privacy Act requires us to notify you that we are authorized to collect this information by section of the Social Security Act. While it is not mandatory for you to furnish the information to the Social Security Administration, a certificate of coverage cannot be issued unless a request has been received.
The information is needed to enable Social Security to determine if work should be covered only under the U. Social Security system in accordance with an international agreement. Without the certificate, work may be subject to taxation under both the U. This information collection meets the clearance requirements of 44 U.
You are not required to answer these questions unless we display a valid Office of Management and Budget OMB control number. We estimate that it will take you about 30 minutes to read the instructions, gather the necessary facts, and write down the information to request a certificate of coverage. The following table shows the various types of Social Security benefits payable under the U. If you do not meet the requirements for these benefits, the agreement may help you to qualify see " How benefits can be paid " section.
We should point out that Canada provides old-age, survivors and disability benefits through two different programs. This table is only a general guide. You can get more specific information about U. Social Security office. Under U. Social Security, you may earn up to four credits each year depending on the amount of your covered earnings. Under the Canadian system, credits are measured in years. To simplify the information in the table, U. This benefit is payable outside Canada for only 6 months following the month of departure from Canada unless the person has at least 20 years of Canadian residence after age No work credits are required.
GIS is payable outside Canada for only 6 months following the month of departure from Canada. CPP- Worker can get full pension at age 65 or reduced pension as early as age Only one contribution 1 year coverage required.
OAS- No provision. CPP- Same as children of disabled worker. QPP- Same as children of disabled worker. CPP- Same minimum contributory requirements as for other survivor benefits.
QPP- Same minimum contributory requirements as for other survivor benefits. If you have Social Security credits in both the United States and Canada, you may be eligible for benefits from one or both countries. If you do not meet the basic requirements, the agreement may help you qualify for a benefit as explained below.
Under the agreement, Canada will consider your U. It is not necessary to visit any office at any stage during this process. Once eligible persons are in the system, benefits are paid monthly on the basis of past income, with over- or underpayments recouped on notification or at subsequent income tax filings.
The integration of GIS with the other systems and delivery through the income tax system leads to, from an American perspective, a very high take-up rate among eligibles. The U. SSI recipients living alone are categorically eligible for food stamps and Medicaid as well. Because elderly recipients of means-tested benefits in both Canada and the United States receive significant medical benefits and health outcomes are similar WHO , we ignore this benefit in comparing the two safety nets.
All but six states provided some type of supplement to this benefit for recipients in specific circumstances such as living in a nursing home SSA b, 5—6. Fifty-five percent of all SSI recipients lived in states with a state cash supplement, making it appropriate to include such payments when comparing benefits between countries. Chart 1 shows the net supplement paid in January to individuals and couples living alone in each of the states that supplemented the cash benefit of all elderly SSI recipients living independently.
The states are ordered by the additional individual benefit adjusted for food stamp effects. The first category "All others" covers the 27 states including the District of Columbia with no general cash benefit supplement; these states accounted for Continuing up the ladder, the median elderly recipient ranked on the basis of total minimum benefit FBR plus state supplement plus minimum food stamps lived in Pennsylvania.
Slightly more than one-quarter of all elderly SSI recipients lived in California; only Alaska which is granted exceptional treatment in the FSP had a higher net supplement.
Because of an exception originally granted in and continued by subsequent legislation, California SSI recipients are ineligible for food stamps because the FSP benefit is "cashed out" in the state supplement Arnold and Marinacci This nuance is incorporated in Chart 1 and subsequent calculations.
We use the PPP recognizing that there are many problems with international comparison of real purchasing power at low income levels. Indeed, one of the advantages of relative poverty measures is that comparing the proportion of persons with incomes less than half the median—for example, across countries—allows one to avoid identifying just what half the median buys. For consistency with our definition of the safety net—the minimum income guarantee—we cite for each state grouping the minimum food stamp entitlement for singles and individuals living alone and dependent wholly on the FBR plus, where available, the state supplement.
However, because of housing and medical cost deductions, most elderly SSI recipients receive more than the minimum food stamp amount. To gain a more complete picture of the combined level of support, we have also included an estimate of the mean FSP benefit received by elderly SSI recipients dependent on SSI. Only in California and Alaska do benefits approach Canadian levels.
Compared with payments to couples, the Canadian system treats single adults less generously than do all but the most generous of U. As shown in Table 1, the comparatively lower Canadian poverty rates for singles discussed by Timothy Smeeding and Susanna Sandstrom arise because the level of benefits for both singles and couples in Canada is much greater than in the United States, whether considered in absolute amounts gauged by purchasing power as in Table 3 or relative to the national median income as in Table 1.
Both the Canadian and U. Here, too, the Canadian system is more generous. In the United States there is no benefit for the survivors of SSI recipients and no complementary benefit for ineligible spouses. Rather, income of ineligible spouses in excess of exclusions that are allowed regular beneficiaries plus a set-aside for a "living allowance" is considered available to the SSI recipient and reduces the SSI benefit SSA , Perception of the consequences of the Canadian system for poverty depends on the standard employed for poverty assessment.
Poverty in the United States continues to be officially assessed using a measure originally developed in the early s Ruggles A more comprehensive measure proposed in the mids by a panel convened at the behest of Congress by the National Research Council—an arm of the National Academy of Science—has not been officially adopted Citro and Michael The standard varies by community size; it is lowest in rural areas and highest in urban areas of , or more.
The cutoffs are reported both before and after income taxes, but both measures include transfers. The low-income measure is based on income alone; this standard is set at 50 percent of median adjusted individual income. Using an equivalence scale, the adjustment—made before calculation of the median—converts each Canadian's family income into the "equivalent" income for a person living alone. The equivalence scale used by Statistics Canada for this purpose assigns a weight of 1.
Once half the median is determined for individuals using this "equilivised" measure as a base, the cutoff is adjusted for larger families by multiplying by the appropriate equivalence weight. Development of the LIM was prompted in part by interest in international comparisons. The difference between the Canadian measure and that of the OECD is that the OECD equivalence scale is simpler, giving a weight of the square root of family size to each family member.
Smeeding uses the square root equivalence scale but focuses on income after taxes, as does the LICO measure that Statistics Canada , 9 "prefers. Table 4 considers the difference between Canada and the United States from the perspective of the poverty measures.
We report U. The first line of data in Table 4 shows that the Canadian basic income guarantee for the elderly substantially exceeds that provided in the United States.
In the second line we report for the United States the OECD poverty standard of 50 percent of median adjusted income, expressed in terms of gross income before taxes but including cash transfers.
Real income is lower in Canada, and half the median—the OECD relative poverty measure—is about 3 percent lower. We also include, in line three, the official U. Having established these points of reference, data lines four and five report the maximum benefit in both countries as a percentage of 1 the percent -of-median standard and 2 the U. Clearly, by both Canadian and U. This generosity extends beyond the minimum guarantee.
The 50 percent disregard leads to a high proportion of Canadian GIS recipients who also have some income from the Canadian Pension Plan or its Quebec equivalent—83 percent in unpublished data provided by the Canada Department of Human Resources and Social Development.
It is the combination of a high basic benefit with substantial disregard of other pension income that lifts so many elderly Canadians above the poverty thresholds. The fixed and small SSI disregard produces substantially less mixing: Fifty-seven percent of elderly U. Social assistance generosity is more than a matter of cash or disregards: Apart from the differences in benefits and treatment of other income, differences in prevalence of poverty in Canada and in the United States may also result from differences in ease of access to the respective safety net systems.
We conclude that the reason why poverty rates are so low in Canada is that the Canadian system is very generous to those with few other resources, and this reduces poverty. Solvency for the self-funding part of the program is less of a problem because almost half of total pension costs comes from general revenues. If a country redistributes more and concentrates this redistribution on the elderly, the relative incomes of elderly people rise, and poverty falls. It is not "rocket science.
If the redistribution of general revenues is concentrated more on the elderly, the arithmetic is expensive—Smeeding and Sandstrom's assertion that Canada spends "slightly more" than the United States is far from the mark. What would it in fact cost to move SSI for the elderly to something like the Canadian safety net? A first estimate is evident from the last column in Table 3: Increase SSI benefits by 25 percent for singles, 34 percent for couples, and some comparable amount for persons living with others, and disregard more Social Security income in benefit calculation.
But this estimate ignores the consequent reduction in FSP benefits, and real emulation of Canada would require elimination of the SSI assets test as well.
Both an increase in benefits and elimination of the assets test would raise SSI take-up. Thus for a first estimate, suppose the United States attempts to somehow simply "fill the gap" between current incomes of the elderly and the amount needed to achieve an income equal to the same percentage of median income as that achieved by Canada's current maximum benefit—that is, 75 percent for singles and 87 percent for couples see Table 4. Depending on certain assumptions about income underreporting in the U.
The "possibly as much as" concept seems likely. Costs would multiply further if the same adjustments were extended to nonelderly SSI recipients. An alternative perspective is to consider the cost of the U. Suppose the United States was to devote the same fiscal effort to establishing a minimum income for the elderly as does Canada. What would be the cost? The tabulation on the next page provides a rough cut at comparing the fiscal commitment involved in the Canadian system compared with the cost of SSI.
TN 6 GN Canadian Social Security benefits consist of two separate programs: 1. Policy—Canadian eligibility requirements. OAS—Residence based benefit. The eligibility requirements for Canadian OAS benefits are as follows: a.
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