Thank you Hot Docs

As Hot Docs Festival 2014 winds down, I just have to give them a big round of applause for their generosity in allowing seniors (and students) to attend the daytime showings for free. In so doing, they are helping to weave a web of inclusiveness, so that we seniors can still take part in Toronto's rich cultural life. I hope many other arts and cultural organizations will follow their example. Use us to fill the seats in the daytime; that's when we prefer to go out.

Why should organizations do this? Because seniors are a vulnerable population. Despite some skewed, agenda-driven media claims to the contrary, our federal government's own statistics show that seniors are overwhelmingly a low-to-modest income group. And health issues make us vulnerable too. Even if we try to stay fit, many seniors in their 60s and 70s no longer have the energy to make it through a workday. Our aging bodies start to make their protests heard. So we're doubly vulnerable: we're stuck on a fixed income, and we can't go to work to raise it. That's our reality. That's why we need a senior-friendly Toronto that opens the door and lets us in, like Hot Docs does.