Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Minister Duclos, for coming in and presenting to us today. Thank you so much for your leadership and your passion and the direction that you're giving the government with respect to those living in poverty. Obviously, today we're talking about seniors.
We have an issue across this country and we have a challenge, but with every challenge comes opportunity. I was reading up on it last night, and the statistics are no surprise, that for the first time in our history, I think, we have more people—5.9 million, in fact—of senior age versus those aged 14 and under at 5.8 million people. As a side number, there are 8,230 Canadians over the age of 100. Those numbers are startling.
With an increasing seniors' population.... In particular, I come from the riding of Saint John—Rothesay in Atlantic Canada, where we have the highest percentage of seniors in Canada, at 20%. If you look at that versus, say, the west coast, and Alberta at 12%, we have our challenges in Atlantic Canada.
It was a learning curve and a learning process for me in 2015, and certainly one of the things I learned going door to door and talking with seniors was how they did feel forgotten, how they were concerned about the change in the eligibility age from 65 to 67. I used to talk to a lot of seniors about what they felt had happened or what is out there from a government perspective to benefit them. A lot of people talked about, or certainly the previous government talked about, the tax-free savings account. I talked to many seniors certainly in Saint John and those living in poverty, and they didn't invest in the tax-free savings account; they didn't have any money to invest in such an account.
First and foremost, minister, from a government perspective on budget 2016-17, can you elaborate on the steps that our government has taken to change the lives of seniors and to pull seniors out of poverty and provide a better life?