Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.
I was a financial administrator before I was elected to Parliament and I always balanced my budget, paid down debts and enhanced services. I always found it's a question of priorities; it's about making the right decisions.
As Mr. Smith mentioned when he spoke at the microphone earlier, we're wasting tens of billions of dollars in overseas tax havens. The federal government bought an old leaky pipeline for $4.5 billion and is going to spend $10 billion or $11 billion trying to put it through, and in my province of British Columbia that results ultimately in the creation of 50 full-time positions. Massive amounts of money are being spent in the wrong places. It seems to me when I look at each of the priorities you've enumerated, they would have a profound impact on the quality of life of Canadians, and you're looking for crumbs. You're looking for incredibly small amounts compared to the billions that Ottawa seems to want to waste.
Ms. Watts, I think you raised some important priorities about seniors. First was the fact that so many seniors lose their pensions, and you mentioned Nortel and there are the Sears pensioners, because of lack of pension protection. You also flagged the fact that many seniors become homeless after hospital stays. In my riding I know of a number of cases of seniors who went into the hospital and lost their housing as a result and they're now on the street in a country as wealthy as Canada.
What happens to seniors when pensions are not prioritized, when the banks get the money before the pensioners do? What happens when we don't have in place any sort of infrastructure to protect seniors' housing when they're forced to go into a hospital?