44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 2:38:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what we saw is that the president of the Trudeau Foundation, a long-time Liberal and good friend of the Trudeau family, Edward Johnson, was a good student. Like the Prime Minister, he wilfully chose to turn a blind eye to Beijing's attempted interference in the foundation to influence the current Prime Minister. The foundation manages $125 million in taxpayer money and Mr. Johnson, a good soldier, put a freeze on all internal investigations into this $140,000 donation from the regime in Beijing.
Why will the Prime Minister not acknowledge that he too wilfully turned a blind eye because his party benefited?
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to participate in the second reading debate on Bill C-319. I would like to thank the member for Shefford for sponsoring this bill.
Private members' bills play an important role in focusing parliamentary attention on issues of concern to Canadians. Last spring, for instance, we had bills on mandatory immunization, employment insurance for adoptive parents, school food programs and, just recently, a bill to amend the Criminal Code for vulnerable adults.
Seniors are the backbone of Canadian society. They are our parents, our grandmothers and our grandfathers. They are our mentors and loved ones. They are our former teachers, our bosses and our leaders. Seniors built our amazing country and they deserve to live out their retirement without worrying about their financial security. I want to speak today to all the measures our government has delivered that support Canadian seniors.
Increasing old age security by 10% for seniors over the age of 75 was the right thing to do, because it was delivering targeted support to those who need it the most. We know that the older seniors get, the more likely they are to experience higher costs due to the onset of illness or disability and increased health-related expenses. The facts and data support the government's decision, because here, on this side of the House, we, unlike some of the other parties in this place, make decisions based upon data and facts.
Let us turn to the numbers to get an idea of how our government's plan has been effective in ensuring that taxpayer dollars are hard at work supporting those who need it most. In 2020, 39% of seniors aged 75 and over received the guaranteed income supplement, compared to 29% of those aged 65 to 74. There are also more women in the over-75 age group than men, and there are more Canadians with a disability in that age group as well. According to the Canadian Survey on Disability, in 2017, 47% of seniors over the age of 75 had a disability, compared to 32% under the age of 75. This evidence tells us that seniors over the age of 75 are more likely to be in vulnerable circumstances. This means that they are more likely to need additional support, so that is exactly what the government delivered.
Conscious of the facts, our government made the responsible decision to make a historic increase to the old age security pension for seniors aged 75 and older. Let us be clear: This was a huge win for seniors. This change represented the first increase to OAS in 50 years. This policy has helped approximately 3.3 million seniors. They received more than $800 extra over the first year of the increase, and the benefit, of course, is indexed to rise with the cost of living, so it will continue to go up.
However, we did not stop there. Since 2015, we have implemented a range of targeted actions that have not only contributed to the lowest poverty rates among seniors in Canadian history, but also positioned Canada as a country with one of the lowest poverty rates in the world for seniors. In fact, one of the very first things the government did after we were elected was reverse the reckless Conservative plan to increase the age of retirement. We immediately lowered the age of eligibility for OAS and GIS, from 67 back to 65, allowing Canadians to retire sooner. This put hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the pockets of Canadian seniors. Bill C-29 was the budget implementation act in 2016. When we look at the voting record, the Conservatives voted against it and the Bloc voted against it. That is where the vote was for the return from 67 to 65 in 2016.
We also raised the guaranteed income supplement by almost $1,000 a year, which helped nearly one million vulnerable single seniors. We know that many seniors want to continue to work past retirement. That is why we extended eligibility for the GIS earnings exemption to include self-employment income and increased the exemption by over 40%, to enable seniors who wished to continue working to do so. On top of all this, we are ensuring that those benefits keep up with the cost of living. In fact, over the past year, OAS and GIS have actually increased by 7.1%, while CPP and QPP have increased by 6.5%. We are proud of our record, which shows that, year after year, we have strengthened seniors' financial security, while lifting hundreds of thousands of seniors out of poverty.
Of course, there is much more work to do. That is why we are bringing the largest expansion of health care in 60 years by providing uninsured seniors access to high-quality dental care. I sincerely hope that the member across the way who is moving the bill will vote for our budget so that she can support seniors with dental care.
We are always better when we work together. I encourage members across the way, including the Bloc, to work with us to support seniors in Quebec and across Canada. However, time and time again, Bloc members are choosing politics over supporting seniors. We can just look at the voting record, and I'll give a few more examples. I just mentioned dental care for seniors, but they have also already voted against the early stage of the budget, and I assume they are going to vote against the budget when it is ready to be voted on. There was also lowering the age of retirement, with Bill C-29, the Budget Implementation Act, in 2016; strengthening the GIS; and our OAS increase that supports the most vulnerable seniors. These are things that they voted against.
However, people should not worry. While opposition parties are playing political games, we are going to stay focused on delivering real results for seniors from coast to coast to coast.
Canada's population is aging. Seniors are the fastest-growing demographic, and we need to be thoughtful in our approach to supporting them. We will continue to be proud of the record that we have in supporting seniors.
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Mr. Speaker, as always, I am honoured to rise for the people of Timmins—James Bay to talk about a very important issue. That is the situation facing senior citizens in this country and the systemic failure to ensure that those who built this nation are able to retire and live in the dignity they deserve.
I was just speaking today with the head of the Cochrane food bank. We are attempting to get supplies of food up into Fort Albany First Nation, which has been under evacuation because of flooding. They tell us the shelves are empty. If we go into the grocery stores in northern Ontario, the bins where people used to fill up with food are nearly empty. The cost of living crisis is hitting seniors more than anyone. They have nothing to show for it, other than these incremental increases that might buy them a Tim Hortons coffee but are not going to put food on the table at this time.
We have to look at the larger picture in terms of the absolute failure we see when seniors need us. They are the people who raised us, built our society, brought us up from being children to adults; however, when need us, we are not there. I look at what happened with COVID in the privatized long-term care facilities and the absolute squalor that elders were left in and died in. It was so bad that the army was sent into Quebec in order to try to keep people alive. We send the army into disaster zones; we should not be sending them into facilities that are run by provinces to protect and to look after senior citizens.
We saw this in Ontario, where the death rates in the privatized care homes were staggeringly high. Afterwards, Doug Ford built this iron ring of protection around all those investors so that they would not be held accountable for failing to keep seniors alive during the pandemic.
I was talking to a widow today who needs to get her teeth fixed. She has a right to have dignity. She should not have to get plates put in. She wants to have her teeth fixed, but it is an $8,000 bill. We have the Conservatives filibustering and trying to stop seniors from getting dental care. The Bloc Québécois members are supporting the attack on senior citizens in this country getting dental care. I cannot think of anything more shameful than that.
I do not know if the Bloc members or the Conservatives ever knocked on a door, but when I knocked on door after door, I talked to seniors, who said to me that they cannot afford to have their teeth fixed. Some people might think this is not that important, but it is so important for their dignity and their sense of health. This is why New Democrats pushed for a national dental care plan that, this year, includes senior citizens. The Bloc members and the Conservatives can fight this all they want, but we will make sure that by the end of this year, we can phone those widows back. We can tell them the $8,000 bill they are facing that they cannot afford to pay will be paid. They deserve it, and they deserve better.
We are very interested in Bill C-319 and this issue of fixing the shortfalls in the pension, but obviously, it would not go far enough. I remember just a few years ago when Stephen Harper flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he announced that Canadian seniors had it a little too good. He was going to increase the age of eligibility for the old-age pension. He did not bother to tell Canadians that. He went to tell the world's elites at the World Economic Forum. He went to tell Klaus Schwab, to whisper in his ear, that Canadian senior citizens were getting too good a deal, and he was going to raise the age.
The Liberals ran on it, saying that they were going to fight that. They said, “We are going to make sure that we restore the age.” Then what did the Liberals do in their budget? They created two classes of senior citizens. They told all our senior citizens aged 74 and under, “Tough luck, get by, it is not too bad.” They told them they had their health, and they said they were going to give a small incremental increase to those aged 75 and older.
Just before inflation hit, I was underground in a gold mine in Timmins. That is tough work, and I met a 70-year-old man working the jackleg drill. People have to be in the best health to run a jackleg drill, because it does massive destruction to the body. He told me that at 70 years old, he had to go back underground to work the drills because he could not afford to look after his sick wife.
That is the situation in Canada. To say that, because he is under 75, he does not need a top-up to his pension is an insult. It is also an insult to say that if we just top up those at 65 to where they are at 75, it will get them through in a time of high inflation, because it is not going to get them through. Any senior citizen will tell us that. What we need are much broader systemic changes to deal with an aging population and the way that we have failed. Certainly, the issue of access to dental care is an important first step.
We also need a housing strategy that works. It is not a housing strategy when the member for Stornoway, who lives off the taxpayer's dime with his personal chef, goes on about how all the gatekeepers have stopped any building. He is attacking the municipalities for being gatekeepers. That is not going to get us housing. What we need is seniors housing. We need a national plan to build seniors housing that is co-operative, reasonable housing. The Liberals promised that. We have never seen so many promises about housing, but where are they? We have not seen it. That is a systemic failure.
With respect to the inability of people to feed themselves at a time of high inflation, and the pitiful amount of money they get in old age security, is a broader, more systemic issue that has to be addressed. We have to rethink the CPP. We have to look at the ability of people, while they are working, to add to their own old age security funds so that, if they are working and saving, that fund will go with them wherever they retire. That is contrary to the member for Stornoway, who by the way has a 19-room mansion. He calls it a tax. Investing in pensions is not a tax. The Conservatives keep saying that because they do not want to put the basic funds in place to have a proper pension.
We need to look at a properly funded pension system, so I look at Bill C-319, and we will certainly support it going forward. It is an incremental step, a baby step, along a long path, but it does not get us there. What gets us there is saying that we cannot live as a society with values when seniors are out on the streets begging, which I see on Elgin Street now. There are senior citizens and widowed grandmothers begging on the streets because they cannot pay their outrageous rents or the cost at the grocery stores, as there is not enough in their pensions. I think we need a broader discussion, one that is across party lines, on how we reform CPP so people can make investments into a public pension, not a privatized RRSP. I know a lot of people who have tried to put money into RRSPs and have told me they will never be able to retire because it will never be sufficient, so we have to address those shortfalls.
We have to send an important message now to senior citizens to admit that Canada has failed them, and is failing them, but that it is not going to continue to fail them. At a time of high inflation, high costs, high rents, high medical costs and the need for access to either pharmacare or dental care, Canada needs to do for them what they did for us. They held us in their arms, raised us and took on immense sacrifices so we could be the society that we are today.
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