I do not know what you are referring to, because I was not there. However, the Bloc Québécois considers the retirement age and the age for receiving OAS to be 65 right now. That debate is over.
The first thing I want to say in answering you, Mr. Long, is that it is too easy to defend yourself by saying that you lowered the retirement age from 67 to 65 and that everything is fixed, period. The question is: what is the retirement age, is it 65 or is it 75? If we have adopted 65 as the cut-off, why create two classes of seniors in a universal program for seniors who retire by adding discrimination based on age? Why have two different amounts, depending on whether a person is 65 or 75?
You talk about your 2015 campaign. My own first campaign was in 2019. What was quickly apparent from my discussions with seniors was that at the time, your idea of raising the pension by 10% for people aged 75 and over was already not acceptable. On the other hand, people liked the idea that in our platform we were proposing to raise the OAS starting at age 65. As early as 2019, we said that there must be no discrimination based on age and that the age of retirement was 65. We did not question that and we wanted to increase the OAS. We even proposed a higher rate than yours, since you were talking about 10% for people aged 75 and over, while we were proposing $110 more per month for anyone aged 65 and over.
That is what I was hearing in 2019 and what I also heard in 2021. People did not understand why you still had that idea.