Mr. Speaker, there are over 70,000 seniors living in my hometown of Hamilton. One in four of them lives in poverty, dependent on the government pension programs they paid into all their lives, and assured that the money they invested in public pensions would be there when they needed it.
They have been betrayed. Payments under the Canada pension plan have always been woefully inadequate.
Now, the federal government has learned that Statistics Canada underestimated the inflation rate for the past five years, meaning that CPP has not even kept up to the cost of living increases. Seniors' pensions should have gone up much more, but they did not.
In their recent mini-budget, the Conservatives gave billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of our most profitable banks and oil companies, but withheld the money that seniors are rightfully owed.
That is right. The Conservatives took money from the pockets of our poorest seniors and handed it over to the wealthiest oil companies.
Our seniors deserve better. They deserve more respect and they certainly deserve their fair share of the very pensions for which they paid.