Status of Women committee  The platform itself is more of policy platform, so it makes key asks of different levels of government. Some of those key asks are specific to gender or sex. In particular, we call out for changes to the ways that we calculate things like GIS and OAS for older women. We would make changes and support a provision parallel to child-rearing benefits for all years of full-time caregiving as a very specific request.

Finance committee  I'll focus on three particular points. The first is that when we're looking at elder abuse, and financial elder abuse in particular, fraud is one component. It is important to know that two-thirds of all elder abuse, including financial abuse, is perpetrated by family members and those closest to the older adult.

Finance committee  Thank you for your question. My French is not always so good for tax either. With your indulgence, I'll respond in English. We're looking at eliminating mandatory registered retirement income fund withdrawals. We would like to see them eliminated. We don't see any economic benefit to forcing older adults to withdraw their money, from a tax point of view.

Finance committee  I just want to offer that we agree it's better for companies not to get into the problem to begin with. We would certainly support having a lack of ability to underfund a pension plan to begin with.

Finance committee  We're concerned about the clawback rate, really just up to the top 50%, to provide respite for the poorest seniors who are trying to alleviate poverty by earning small amounts of income. Older adults are living longer, people are in the workforce longer, and they need to be in the workforce longer.

Finance committee  What we see is that older adults are living in poverty. We see particularly older women disproportionately affected. We see poverty across the women's life course. We see challenges with housing security in particular where they may have to go into a hospital and they may have been in some form of housing like long-term care and they'll lose that.

Finance committee  We're doing very little. Under a previous government, there were national awareness campaigns and so on, but response to elder abuse falls under the provinces and territories. There is no sustained funding for any organization in Canada to focus on elder abuse and neglect. The data from a national prevalence study, which you also referred to, by Statistics Canada under-represents the problem because most elder abuse and neglect is not reported.

Finance committee  It was extremely effective. We have statistics which indicate that when the national awareness campaign was invested in—and with investment also, like my colleagues were mentioning, in the research and development field within universities in knowledge mobilization, funding that had priorities and tri-council funding combined with awareness—we saw jumps in reporting of between 27% to 43%.

Finance committee  No, the provinces and territories are begging for help.

Finance committee  Good morning, everyone. My name is Laura Tamblyn Watts, and I'm the chief public policy officer for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, which I'll call CARP throughout my submission. Thank you for the honour of addressing you today. CARP is a national, non-partisan association that advocates for older Canadians.