2025 Federal Budget Roundup: Initiatives to Support Older Adults

On November 4, the Government of Canada tabled its 2025-2026 budget. Entitled “Canada Strong,” Budget 2025 outlines the government’s commitment to responding to significant global economic shifts, strengthening Canadian sovereignty, and reducing costs for Canadians. 

The budget lays out what it describes as a “generation investment strategy” to boost the economy and build critical infrastructure, while also outlining plans to cut government operating costs by $60 billion over five years. These savings will be achieved, in part, through the restructuring of operations and consolidation of internal services. This includes a 10% reduction in the public service population, around 40,000 individuals, by the end of 2028-29. 

While the budget is light on new investments that will directly benefit older adults, it does reaffirm the government’s commitment to sustain critical programs, such as pharmacare, and the Canadian Dental Care Program, which is already demonstrating promising results among older adults. However, it remains to be seen how the reduced public service workforce will impact the provisioning of these important services. 

Here is a roundup of Budget 2025 announcements impacting older adults:

Supporting caregivers and the care economy

  • Budget 2025 proposes to introduce a temporary personal support workers tax credit, which would provide eligible personal support workers with a refundable tax credit of 5% of eligible earnings, providing a yearly credit of up to $1,100. This support for frontline health care workers would be available from 2026 to 2030 with an estimated cost of $1.48 billion over six years.

  • No new initiatives were announced to support unpaid caregivers. As outlined in our 2025 pre-budget submission, we continue to advocate for the development and implementation of a National Caregiving Strategy, and for the government to fulfill its 2021 commitment to transform the Canada Caregiver Credit into a refundable benefit.

Community-Based Seniors Serving Sector

  • The federal government is committed to maintaining the New Horizons for Seniors Program at the current funding level. The program will continue to offer up to $25,000 to support projects in local communities that improve the quality of life of older adults. No additional investments were made to support the Community-Based Seniors Serving Sector (CBSS), which plays a vital role in delivering the services older Canadians need to age in the place that is right for them.

Canada Disability Benefit

  • Budget 2024 announced the funding for the Canada Disability Benefit. At $6.1 billion over six years, the benefit would begin in July 2025 and provide a maximum of $2,400 annually to an estimated 600,000 eligible recipients aged 18 - 64 who hold a valid Disability Tax Credit certificate.

  • Budget 2025 reaffirms the government’s commitment to easier access to the Canada Disability Benefit. To help offset the costs of applying for the Disability Tax Credit for recipients of the Canada Disability Benefit, the Budget proposes a one-time payment of $150 for Disability Tax Credit certifications or re-certification, giving rise to a Canada Disability Benefit entitlement. This one-time payment would be retroactive to the launch of the Canada Disability Benefit. The Budget also confirms the government’s commitment to promulgate legislation exempting the Canada Disability Benefit from being treated as income under the Income Tax Act.

Income Supports

  • Budget 2025 commits to amending the Income Tax Act to enable automatic tax filing in certain circumstances to better connect low-income Canadians to income supports. 

  • Funding for Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) (‘elderly benefits’ under Budget 2025) remain unchanged under Budget 2025. The total payments are expected to reach $83.1 billion in 2025-26 and are projected to grow by an annual average of 5.9 percent, reflective of the growth in population of older adults and inflationary increases.

  • No increases to GIS were announced, and we continue to await the government to fulfil its 2021 commitment to increase the GIS by $500 for single individuals and $750 for couples. We also continue to advocate that GIS earnings exemption be increased to $10,000 per year and indexed to inflation to enable low-income older adults who are working to keep more of their earnings.  GIS is a critical anti-poverty initiative that can make all the difference for an older adult struggling to afford food and shelter.

Health and pharmacare

  • In 2024, we were pleased to see the launch of the National Pharmacare Plan, starting with contraception and diabetes medication, along with a budget of $1.5 billion over five years. While the federal government reaffirmed its commitment to pharmacare in Budget 2025, it is silent on any further expansion of the program.

  • Despite vaccination coverage among older adults falling below federal targets, there were no announcements regarding vaccine access. We continue to urge the federal government to work with provinces and territories to ensure publicly funded access to all vaccines recommended by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) for older adults, including vaccines for COVID-19, influenza, pneumococcal disease, RSV, and shingles. 

Housing

  • Budget 2025 proposes to amend the Home Accessibility Tax Credit to prohibit claiming an expense under the Home Accessibility Tax Credit if it has been claimed as a medical expense tax credit. Under the current regime, if the eligibility criteria for both credits are met, taxpayers would be able to claim both credits in respect of the same expense. 

  • To claim the credit, expenses under the Home Accessibility Tax Credit must be incurred through improving the safety, accessibility, or functionality of an eligible dwelling of a qualifying individual who is either aged 65 or older, or otherwise eligible for the disability tax credit. To claim the medical expense tax credit, eligible expenses must relate to certain costs of building or renovating a home to improve access or mobility for persons with disabilities.

  • This proposal would reduce the tax credit amount available to older adults who incur expenses for creating or improving the accessibility of their homes. 

Protecting Older Adults

  • We are pleased to see the federal government recognize and move ahead with taking a stronger approach against increasingly sophisticated financial crimes and economic abuse that disproportionately affect older Canadians. Budget 2025 proposes to protect Canadians by:

    • Launching a National Anti-Fraud Strategy to implement a cross-sectoral approach to protect Canadians from complex fraud schemes.

    • Creating a new Financial Crimes Agency that will be Canada’s lead enforcement agency on complex financial crimes, including fraud and online financial scams.

    • Amending the Bank Act and promulgating relevant regulations to require banks to have policies and procedures to address consumer-targeted fraud and report data on consumer-targeted fraud to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada.

    • Establishing a voluntary Code of Conduct for the Prevention of Economic Abuse for federally regulated banks that will set expectations for how banks can identify, prevent, and respond to economic abuse. While the introduction of the Code of Conduct is welcome, it would have been preferable for the Code to be a mandatory standard for all regulated banks.  

Gender and Diversity Impacts

  • Budget 2025 proposes to renew the National Public Alerting System to protect diverse groups from a broad range of risks by providing accessible, bilingual alerts for wildfires, floods, public safety threats, and Amber Alerts.

National Institute on Ageing