Thank you.
I'm Anne Repetowski, and I'm an outreach worker. Our concern for seniors is about the wait times for processing Service Canada applications for old age security, guaranteed income supplement, guaranteed income supplement estimates and allowances.
I will give you a bit of background about Seniors Outreach. We've been running for approximately 35 years in the city of Grande Prairie. We are a northwestern Alberta community, and we service a large region, with just over 6,000 client files. There were approximately 4,000 walk-ins to our office last year. We have three full-time staff and a part-time receptionist, and we have two outreach workers. Sherry is our director. In 2016 we saw 2,629 clients in the year. It's a fairly good volume for our little office. We try to help them, provincially and federally, with anything to do with the pensions.
Our concern with Service Canada—with old age security and the guaranteed income supplement—is the long processing times and how they affect seniors. When they have delayed old age security, have complex old age security because they weren't born in Canada or haven't lived in Canada their whole life, or have an estimate to do with retiring or pensions ending—or even something as simple as if they've been on income support provincially and Canada pension plan disability payments, and the disability is going down to retirement—the wait times for an estimate in Alberta are at 35 weeks, which is 8.75 months.
When you are on a very fixed income, it puts you into a struggle as to how you pay for rent, medications, and so forth, and there's a lot of anxiety, worry, concern, and stress for people. Sherry's been doing this for 25 years, and I've been doing this for 18 years, and one of the things we have noticed is that in the last six to seven years, the wait times have doubled or tripled. When I started, it was three months to apply and get your estimate done at the same time, and people would have a result quite soon. Now, with this 8.75-month wait, we're seeing it not just take that amount of time, but even go as high as 22 months. I've had one client this year—a very unusual instance—who had waited three years to have their case taken care of.
It's sometimes because people aren't as aware of the procedures with Service Canada, in applying and doing follow-ups, because they don't deal with it daily and this isn't their.... They're concerned about their finances but they don't know how to approach it, and sometimes there's a bit of worry in dealing with government. We're seeing, on average, especially at the beginning of this year, that it was 11 to 23 months as an average for processing those estimates, so that puts them in a really tight space in terms of paying for their basic necessities.
We also have an issue when they are in urgent or dire need, because they're behind on rent or there's a concern. There was an issue about even those being processed in under the four weeks we were being advised it could take: we were seeing two to three months for those to be processed. This year, for the first time, we went from a fifth-level escalation, which means you've phoned in five times in dire need, asking for urgent processing. We even went up to 11th-level processing in January, and in March I had clients coming in and telling me that when they phoned from home, they were told not to phone anymore and that it would be done when it was done. That's a concern, when they've been waiting for over a year for back pay.
People who are on fixed income, have lost a spouse, retired from employment, are on workers' compensation or employment insurance, or have private pensions going down, those are the people who are struggling, and they're on a fixed income already.
Basic old age security is at $585.49 this month, and people may or may not have Canada pension. In Alberta, if they get the guaranteed income supplement, the GIS, plus the Alberta seniors benefit, which is a small provincial program, the most they're living on is $1,750 a month. The rents up here in Grande Prairie are usually around $900 to $1,000 for a basic one-bedroom apartment. Seniors lodges in our area start off at about $1,100 a month. It starts putting them on a very tight income, especially when they have a medication assistance program and must pay the cost to have that administered in lodges.
Our concern is the desperation seniors have. They borrow money, and they use up credit cards, so, yes, when they get the back pay, it's wonderful, and it helps alleviate some of that stress, but it doesn't help with the interest and the worry for all that time, the anxiety and the stress, which seem to aggravate—and I'm not a health care professional—their health and their wellness. They're not familiar with the necessity to follow through with phone calls, that after eight months, if they haven't heard an answer, they need to phone in. They're not getting the responses, and that's why it's taking so long.
The other concern is that even basic correspondence takes 20 weeks, which means five months. If somebody is getting married, and we're helping them to write in to say they've been married, and it changes their eligibility for the guaranteed income supplement or the allowance, it can take five months. We've had a few people this last year, probably about four now, who have serious back pay by the time it's processed and looked at. A change of address; authorization to communicate when somebody is going into a designated supported living facility and they need family members to help them out; powers of attorney; all of those items are in such delay that we're talking half a year for backlog and correcting things, which is a serious effect for seniors. That's what our concern is. We're hoping that somehow we could make those processing times better.
Thank you.