Thank you.
Turning to our senior citizens, a resident of Ontario who turns 65 with no savings, no Canada Pension, or no other income of any kind receives a base guarantee of $15,200 a year through old age security, the guaranteed income supplement, and provincial credits of various sorts. This base guarantee has been kept up to date for decades.
Benefits to seniors represent 49% of all income security expenditures in Canada, and this portion will soon rise to more than 50% and grow much larger post-2011, when those in the baby boom generation start turning 65 years old. Our ongoing support for seniors represents good policy. Our income security program should be kept up to date and we should ensure that benefits don't erode with inflation.
What is bad is that programs and policies for working-age adults are not similarly kept up to date, not even for those who are not capable of working. Consider the following facts.
Single welfare recipients can receive less than $6,500 a year, down 45% in real terms since 1993. The rates have now fallen to pre-Centennial levels, again in inflation-adjusted terms. Welfare costs now represent 5% of the overall expenditures in the income security system in Ontario. A single disabled recipient obtaining a disability allowance in Ontario now receives just under $11,500 a year, down more than 20% in real terms since the early 1990s, and now $3,700 a year less than the neediest senior.
Minimum wages, despite increases, are much lower in real terms than they were in the 1970s and less than they were in the 1990s. Single minimum wage earners net 18% less than the neediest single senior. If they redouble their efforts and earn the extra money, that will bring them up to the level of the neediest senior, but 36% of their gross pay is deducted from their paycheque in the form of EI and CPP deductions, income tax, and reduced tax credits. EI benefits have decreased in real terms for the 22% of the unemployed in Toronto who are eligible for them. At the same time, the EI fund has accumulated a significant surplus.
As a result, low-income wage earners increasingly cannot afford to live in our cities where the work is, and there is no sign of redress. Income security programs for seniors continue to be protected through indexation, while no benefits or policy measures for working-age adults are protected in any way. They just continue to erode.