The motion is that:
The Committee requests that the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development appear before the Committee for two hours as soon as possible to discuss the Conservative government's new policy of eliminating a senior citizens' ability to exempt Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIF) from the calculation of GIS eligibility through the use of the “option provision” as otherwise allowed in the Old Age Security Act and the consequences this will have on seniors who receive Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) payments.
This comes about from information that was disclosed, or became more public, a couple of weeks ago that seniors would be very significantly burdened by having their GIS eligibility and the amount of money they would collect from GIS affected by taking money out of their RRIF. I can recall seniors who are very severely poor by any standard, and to further impoverish them by affecting their GIS through this I think is particularly punitive.
The minister indicated in the House that she was going to have a review of this. But what we need to do is find out how this came about in the first place. Apparently it's a change that's been made very quietly and it affects an awful lot of people, among them the poorest seniors in the country. So I think it's worth having some discussion on this and bringing the minister forward to talk about it.