Industry News
The recession may be officially over, but six in 10 Canadians are still surviving from paycheque to paycheque, a national survey showed Monday.
Fifty-nine percent of Canadian workers say they would be in financial trouble if their paycheque was delayed by just a week – the same proportion as last year when the economy was still mired in a downturn, according to a poll of 2,766 people by the Canadian Payroll Association.
The survey comes as the OECD warned that record high debt levels have left many Canadians vulnerable “to any future adverse shocks.” Also Monday, a Statistics Canada report showed household net worth fell 0.6% in the second quarter, largely due to falling stock markets. Liabilities of households increased, meantime, led by mortgages and consumer credit.
Canada remains a debt nation, owing partly to a flurry of home-buying in this year. Eight in 10 Canadians in the poll say their first or second priority if they were to win a $1-million lottery would be to pay off their debt – an 11% increase from last year, “indicating that more Canadians are concerned about their debt load than they were a year ago,” the survey said.
Click here to read the full article in The Globe and Mail.