Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for getting up as early as we did.
I wanted to get a conversation going between Professor Wolfson and Mr. Ambachtsheer about your article. You've written several interesting articles, but I wanted to focus on the article in the Toronto Star that OAS savings could turn out to be costly. Your argument is essentially that the government will save “$4 billion”, but by the time you take out taxes, etc., you are down to $3.5 billion, ignoring the effect on provincial revenues. What are poor people supposed to do? They are going to have to dip into their savings, or move in with relatives, or they either have to go on welfare, or the GIS program gets enhanced.
Have I summarized it correctly? Is this announcement much to do about nothing? By the time you shuffle all these chairs on the deck you're essentially, not only not saving anything, you're just creating a downloading effect either on the ability of poor seniors to look after themselves or on to provincial revenues.