Thank you, Wayne.
I don't want to be too focused on your own work, knowing that everyone's work around the table matters immensely, but I've had the good fortune of seeing you in action in your riding, and I have seen your passion and your compassion for those Canadians who need better health and better support when it comes to being and doing well.
Coming back to the change in the age of eligibility, we all know the importance of the challenges and the opportunities for an aging society and aging population. There are ways to improve the living conditions of our senior citizens as well as their savings and work behaviours. However, this must be done with great care and with appropriate sensitivity to the well-being of the more vulnerable seniors. When that change was made—and I'm saying this with complete transparency—unfortunately, too little evidence was produced on the adverse impacts it was going to have on our more vulnerable seniors. The seniors who would be the most affected by this change in the age of eligibility would have had the least ability to protect themselves through changing their work and savings behaviour while enduring the greatest impact.
Just to give you two figures, the top 20% of those seniors, aged 65 and 66, would have lost 5% of their income. The bottom 20% of those seniors would have lost 35% of their income. The men in the median of that age category would have lost about 10% of their income. The women in the median would have lost 33% of their income, and that's because women in that age group are more vulnerable than men. A social sensitivity lens would have been useful in that debate before thinking of implementing such a dramatic change that would, again, have plunged 100,000 seniors into severe poverty.
I think it was important to recognize this very early in our mandate, which we did by changing the age to 65.