Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the question.
Maybe I can give a sense of the rationale behind the choice to move forward on a supplement for single seniors. I think your key point is that the guaranteed income supplement is now available to both singles and couples, and that in the budget initiative announced in the past few weeks, the government made the choice to increase the supplement for singles but not for couples.
As Minister Duclos said when he was here on Monday, the basic rationale is that, of the Canadian seniors who currently live in low-income situations.... As you know, our statistics on the proportion of seniors in low-income situations are quite impressive. The proportion has declined quite dramatically over time. The most recent year for which we have data, which is 2013, tells us that about 3.7% of Canadian seniors are living with income below Statistics Canada's low income cut-off.
Of those seniors—it's about 190,000 senior Canadians—close to 80% are in fact singles, so about 151,000 of seniors who live on low incomes are single. That is the basic rationale for the government's decision to focus on that sub-population.