Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for coming today, and to your team, which I know has worked very hard on our budget as well.
As you know, my riding is Northumberland—Peterborough South. Mine is a 3,000 square-kilometre rural riding in eastern Ontario. The diversity of our economy and the diversity of our population are things that I am seeing reflected in this budget.
The Canada child benefit, which of course was announced in a previous budget, just to give some sense of it, brings just under $6 million a month into our riding. When I go around and talk to small businesses, shopkeepers and stores, they're seeing the benefit of that money being spent in our riding. The lift that's being received, in terms of economic development in my riding and, I would say in rural communities specifically, has been significant.
There's another demographic within my riding, I believe the last StatsCan numbers showed that just over 40% of my riding is over the age of 55, so seniors and issues surrounding seniors are very important to us. There were a couple of things in this budget that responded to a number of things I was hearing. Certainly in a previous budget, when we increased the guaranteed income supplement by almost $1,000 for the most vulnerable seniors, if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, that lifted about 100,000 seniors out of poverty and prevented about 150,000 from falling into poverty.
This current budget talks about the enhancement of the earnings exemption, whereby, in easy terms, seniors are able to work and retain more of the income they have earned without losing the benefit of the GIS and those benefits and supports that go along with it. One of the things that surprised me when I read the budget was the automatic enrolment for those aged 70 and over. What I was surprised at were the number of people who hadn't enrolled to receive the benefits they were entitled to. I know we've done that in other programs and I see that as something very positive.
One thing in particular that I'm not sure has received as much attention as it should is something called the advanced life deferred annuity. When you mention those words, people's eyes glaze over, but I heard from a lot of my seniors who were middle-income that they were looking for something that would help them, as they retired a few years ago when life expectancies were shorter. They're much longer and people are concerned that they're actually going to outlive the money they have saved over their working years in order to retire. This talks specifically to the ability of people to take some of their RSPs and move them into an annuity for the time past age 85.
I wonder if you could speak a bit about why that's in here and what you see as being a benefit to retirees.