Thank you so much for the question.
When we look across the life course, there are a number of different pieces that we need to pull together. One of them does very much deal with the consumer financial protection aspect that we're talking about today, and one of them will also reflect the OAS and CPP piece. The first is that we can charge, and I say charge because that's what you're doing. They're paying into CPP and OAS. You're charging your clients who are the people paying in. You can index it to less. You can look at the actuarial science around the cost paid in and paid out. That hasn't been looked at for many years. There's an opportunity to bring a gender lens for the real cost in and the real cost out.
The second piece could be quite simple. Under certain qualifications, we could give women more money, particularly single women, who are the poorest population in Canada, as a broad group. You can also offset it by looking at caregiving dropout provisions, which are similar to what my colleague was talking about with the child tax benefit. There are tools to reflect the life course caregiving challenges, which are not yet used as revenue tools or concessions to revenue tools.
We certainly can look at ways across the life course, particularly because we know that older women are also caring for other older women, men, and other people across the life course. As they age, caregiving is not concluded. We can look at some of those analogous tools to the child tax benefit and look at those for caregiving provisions.
The last piece I will say—and I was reflecting on this with our colleague from ADR Chambers—is that in the conversations with the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, they've indicated that 50% to 70% of their cases deal with older people. There's a gender piece in that, as well, because proportionately there are more women than men.
Interestingly enough, there are fewer women using the complaint provisions and bringing forward their complaints. I know that it speaks to other research that we have in this area to suggest that women don't necessarily have the same financial literacy opportunities and the same abilities to complain, or the same relationships with financial institutions. I see it as a multi-varied approach. There are really positive things that we can do about it.