Social changes are forcing Canadians to rethink their traditional ideas about retirement, according to a new study released today by Statistics Canada.

The report, New Frontiers of Research on Retirement, centres on four main themes: the gender differences in retirement patterns; joint retirement is becoming an issue for many couples; maintaining a standard of living in retirement is also becoming an issue; and, retirement paths will become more and more flexible as some workers opt for self-employment.

StatsCan notes that the behaviour of baby boomer women will greatly influence what retirement in Canada looks like in the future. Women are much more likely than men to see retirement as involving more than just getting a pension or stopping paid work, it says.

Also, it suggests that the growing number of women with substantial pension benefits is having a major impact on decisions about retirement in Canadian families. “For more and more couples, decision-making is becoming much more complex,” it notes.

“Amid growing uncertainty about their future financial security, an increasing number of people do not know when they will retire. Others have simply delayed their retirement,” StatsCan adds. It reports that almost 20% of those surveyed in the 2002 General Social Survey said they did not intend to retire at all. Also, many individuals who took early retirement are going back to work, some for financial reasons.

“In addition, the rising prevalence of non-standard work arrangements, such as contract, part time, or casual jobs, will worsen the financial security of future retirees. Workers in non-standard jobs generally do not have an on-going relationship with a particular employer, thus limiting their access to workplace pension plans,” it points out.

Two particularly vulnerable groups are immigrants and women living alone, StatsCan says. “Employment was the major source of income for older immigrants from 1980 to 2002. This group has not benefited as much as the Canadian-born from the maturation of public and private pension systems. Workplace pension income for immigrants 65 and over was 21% lower than for the entire elderly population.”

A challenge for employees of all ages is to better understand how to plan financially, how government pensions work, what kinds of pensions or retirement savings plans are available, the risks associated with different plans, and how to effectively manage personal saving and debt, it says.

“With a massive wave of retirement looming among baby boomers, the labour supply from older workers will grow in importance. Many will likely choose to become self-employed, making flexible retirement paths more prevalent,” it suggests.

The study provides the first estimate of the size of the advantage enjoyed by the self-employed in terms of retirement flexibility. It found that the self-employed were 10 percentage points more likely than the salaried to have a flexible retirement.

Data also show that the self-employed are more likely to return to the labour market after having left it. Among those who were in their transition to retirement and left the labour market between 1996 and 1997, 29% of the self-employed were rated as having a high or medium likelihood of returning. This was double the proportion of only 13% of salaried employees.