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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 47

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 28, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 47 - Mar/28/22
Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)
  • Mar/28/22 6:48:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am rising this evening to follow up on a question that I asked at the end of last year about the government's treatment of some of the most financially vulnerable during the pandemic, including many seniors. Since then, we have gone through the omicron wave of COVID-19, and a couple of things stand out about that wave in particular. The first is that I think it was a wave where people were, relatively speaking, less concerned about the effects on their personal health. That is not true for everyone, but it is true for many who noted that omicron, we are told, had less severe symptoms for many people who got it than those who got one of the preceding variants of COVID-19. Also, frankly, there was very widespread uptake of the vaccine by the time omicron got here, which had not been true for previous iterations of COVID-19. Overall, for many people, it was a wave that felt less threatening from a personal health point of view, although there were still many people who found themselves in hospital, many people who were seriously ill in hospital and many people who were concerned about access to medical services for things other than COVID. They may not have been as worried about COVID getting them very sick, but they were still concerned about access to medical resources in the event that they were sick or injured from something else. It was a very disruptive wave, and there was a lot of fear and anxiety on the financial side that we had not quite experienced with the other wave. This was largely because it was the first big wave of COVID since the government had chosen to first drastically reduce the amount of CRB payments by 40%, from $2,000 a month to $1,200 a month, and because the Liberals ultimately did away with the CRB program altogether post-election and replaced it with programs that were much more difficult to access. It was the first time that a lot of Canadians really did not have robust financial support to fall back on when the economic disruption of omicron struck. I raise that because many Canadians are still contending with those very difficult economic circumstances. There are seniors experiencing that. New Democrats fought very hard in the fall alongside people in civil society and many seniors' advocacy groups to make sure that those seniors who were being punished by having the CRB, which they rightly received according to the rules, clawed back through their GIS. They were being evicted from their homes and released into destitution. We finally succeeded in getting the government to try and correct that. That was a good thing. We are hoping that the assistance is going to arrive in the weeks to come, very shortly in April, but we are thinking about seniors who are still facing a lot of cost challenges, particularly those seniors between the ages of 65 and 75 who are not going to see the increase in the old age supplement that other seniors are seeing. We in the NDP feel that there is a fundamental unfairness there to be creating two tiers of seniors, and I want to ask the government if it will finally decide to get rid of the two-tier senior model and have a uniform increase for the old age supplement that would apply to all seniors.
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