Thanks very much.
I'm going to talk to you briefly about CARP. We are a 300,000-member advocacy organization with our primary membership in Ontario, followed by British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia.
I will also say that we are going to be in Ottawa on October 25, and I look forward to the chance to meet with many of you in person then.
I'm going to start by talking about the income issues; then, time permitting, I'll share my thoughts on other areas.
With respect to the question of how the government can improve income security for vulnerable seniors, the biggest challenge is to improve affordable housing. What we know is that many vulnerable seniors are vulnerable because by the time they've paid for their housing they can no longer pay for nutritious food, transportation, and medical care.
Seniors are impacted both directly and indirectly. Many seniors have helped their adult children and adult grandchildren buy homes, something that has significantly adversely affected, through the increase in housing prices, their retirement security.
As my colleague mentioned, the face of senior poverty is overwhelmingly female. The median income in 2013 for a senior woman was $21,900, compared with $32,300 for a man. We need to take steps to fix this.
One thing we can do is look at how we can support caregivers better. These caregivers are providing $26 billion annually of unpaid and informal care. We have a provision in the CPP to give child rearers, primarily women, a time out when they are raising children. We would love to see that extended to caregivers, but also, being aware that having other CPP contributors subsidize it would be a regressive tax, we look for something more innovative, such as government funding for those CPP premiums.
We'd also love to see more programs for caregivers, things such as respite care and adult day care centres, so that caregivers don't have to choose between working and staying at home and providing care.
We need to dramatically increase the uptake on the programs we currently offer. Estimates I've seen range between 100,000 and 150,000 for Canadians who are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement but aren't claiming it. This is unconscionable. We need to provide it automatically.
For example, in the U.K. most citizens don't file tax returns; it is done automatically on their behalf by the government. I think that's something that's well worth exploring, particularly for our lowest wage earners and lowest-income retirees. We need to make sure that if anybody is already filing a tax return, they automatically get their GIS paid and don't have to file additional and supplemental forms.
What I have heard anecdotally is that there are certain barriers in place for people to get GIS. We need to switch that around and make it as seamless as possible for people to get this support. We need to work with the local agencies that have already earned the trust of our most vulnerable seniors and enable them to help people get the benefits for which they qualify.
We also need to recognize that the Internet isn't a panacea for the older-years population. In 2013, the general social survey found that only 54% of senior women and 59% of senior men had used the Internet in the past 12 months. I'm sure those numbers are higher now than they were then, but there's still a significant cohort of our most senior seniors and also our most low-income seniors who do not have access to the Internet.
We need to tweak our income-support programs to better support low-income seniors and incent older Canadians to continue working. We need to reform our RRIF withdrawal policy so that people aren't incented to over-withdraw from their RRIFs, running out of funds before they run out of time.
CARP recommends an amnesty for RRIF withdrawals for our lowest-income seniors. Many individuals, through lack of financial literacy, have contributed to an RRSP when it wasn't in their best interests—when they were low-income earners—getting very little benefit from doing so and now facing GIS clawbacks when they withdraw.
We need to change our structure for CPP so that there are incentives to continue working not just to age 70 but beyond, and similarly for OAS.
There are a number of corporate pension plans that prevent individuals from continuing to gain from contributing past age 65. We need to try to change that. For some individuals, unless you take your CPP at 65, if you have already fully contributed there's no benefit to contributing beyond that. We need to change that. We need to make that equitable.
I concur with my colleague about making tax credits non-refundable. For example, caregiver tax credits need to go to our most vulnerable and those with the lowest income, those who aren't already paying taxes. We need to tackle the GIS clawback.
We need to take steps to protect those who have already taken steps to protect their own retirement. CARP is currently running a pension campaign to protect corporate pensioners, and that's what we'll be talking about on October 25.
We strongly support provincial governments to implement a best interest standard, to ban embedded fees, and to take steps to harmonize regulations so that investors are protected and we don't pay some of the highest fines in the world.