Human Resources Committee on Feb. 8th, 2024

[James Janeiro]

Absolutely. Yes.

The short answer is yes. The National Institute on Ageing data that I referred to and our own Canadian caregiving survey both collected along gender lines, and the gender splits are there. I won't comment on the National Institute on Ageing—NIA—data. It's widely available, and I'm happy to share it with your office as well. It was just released and is excellent work.

On our own data around caregivers, not surprisingly, what we see just generally across the board is that men and women are, fifty-fifty, just as likely as not to be caregivers. It's an approximately fifty-fifty split, but women are, by orders of magnitude, more likely to be caregivers for longer, to take on more care responsibilities or to do it more often over the course of their lives. This is where that issue about CPP contributions becomes quite germane, because if you're in and out of the labour market, that becomes a problem. Similarly, in the EI system, if you're in and out of the labour market because of your care responsibilities, that becomes a problem as well.

The slightly longer answer to your question is that the gender breakdown of the caregiving data shows all of the issues I've illuminated, but to a greater degree, frankly, for women.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Madam Zarrillo.

Ms. Ferreri, you have five minutes.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses as we study Bill C-319, an act to amend the Old Age Security Act.

Perhaps I can start with you, Mr. Janeiro.

Can I call you James? Okay. It's great to see you again.

I think what we're hearing here today is that obviously seniors are in dire straits. Basically, there are so many people in dire straits. Our seniors seem to be more on the vulnerable end of that position. Your testimony today was about primarily caregivers. I think a lot of us here who have aging parents—and those who are watching—know, and it hit home. I saw a lot of nods as you were giving your testimony.

This bill is saying to increase old age from $5,000 to $6,500 a year, which seems so minimal, I'll be honest with you, in a cost of living crisis, which you touched on. When have you ever seen inflation or a cost of living crisis be this bad in your time of working in this industry?

[James Janeiro]

I'm 36 years old. I've never seen this in my life. To be completely honest with you, I think we're all living that across the world, frankly, seeing what inflation is doing to retirement incomes and other more fixed incomes as well.

I'll also say that when I was in school doing my master's about 10 years ago, seniors poverty was sort of taught as a victory. We had figured this out. As one of the speakers alluded to, and Mr. Collins also pointed out in his remarks, our seniors poverty rate in Canada, up until fairly recently, was low and going lower. We were a leader in the world in that regard. Unfortunately—I can share some of this data with your office—even looking at one particular town, that of Hamilton, Ontario, where there's been some recent studies done, poverty rates across the board have trickled either down a little bit or stayed flat, but amongst seniors they've started to go up.

What had been a victory not long ago, that scourge of seniors poverty, seems to be surfacing for us again. The cost of living is a large part of it, frankly. If you're living on a fixed income and your grocery bill is orders of magnitude larger this month than it was a year ago, you'll feel that in your fixed income.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

If you want to table that to the committee, I think that would be useful for the report.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, yes, this is an important bill, but it feels like you're on a hamster wheel. You're going to pay out more money. It's going to cost more money. You're going to have to make up that money. But if you didn't have the cost of living already exponentially out of control, you wouldn't have these kinds of problems.

To my colleague Ms. Roberts' point earlier about the carbon tax, which is one of the things we're seeing driving up the cost of food in particular, seniors who are dealing with these soaring heating costs when they're on a fixed income, especially the caregivers, are under so much stress. This isn't drama. This is reality. The pain is very, very real. The human consequences of inflation are very real.

Where do you see carbon tax fitting into this stress?

[James Janeiro]

Your analogy about the hamster wheel is a pertinent one. In our survey that I referenced earlier, we asked caregivers to throw in a few words, unprompted, about their experience. The hamster wheel came up quite often, frankly, because it just feels like you're spinning. You're always googling at 3 a.m. to see the next thing you can qualify for to make your life or the life of the person you care for a little bit easier. Frankly, you often come up with very little from that search. It is a hamster wheel for far too many.

I won't comment specifically on the carbon tax, because I don't know, frankly. I don't know the input or the ratio between carbon tax on one end and senior income and caregiver income at the other. What I can tell you is that I think we all have a collective responsibility. Our elected officials have a collective responsibility to do what we can to bring down that cost of living for everybody. Everybody living on a fixed income, be it a senior or any other, feels this in an acute way. If you're in a position where you're renegotiating your salary at the end of a work year or something like that, you have some movement. If your income is fixed, you don't have that luxury.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you.

I want to read into the record a message I got from a constituent of mine: “Sorry to send my crying heart to you, but I need to get this off my chest. I've lived in Peterborough all my life. I worked at General Motors for 35 years. I sent my daughter to university to become a lawyer. I paid off my house, and now with my pension I can't afford to live with these prices. When I pay all my bills at the start of the month it leaves me $2 to spend. I'm 65 years old and I'm now looking for a job to support myself before I lose my house. I'm just hoping an election is soon so we can turn things around."

These are the messages we're getting. I think when you waste taxpayers' money, this is what happens in terms of the cost of inflation.

I really do thank you for what you do, because the caregivers are not okay right now. They desperately need you. Thank you for being their voice.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Ferreri.

Mr. Fragiskatos, you have five minutes.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Cost of living challenges affect all of us as MPs because they affect our constituents. That's true of every democracy, Mr. Chair. I think it's important that we discuss these issues and face them head on, as other parliamentarians are doing in various democracies.

Mr. Sweetman, first of all, thank you for appearing today.

I was quite interested in the point that you raised on opportunity cost.

Could you summarize that again, sir, and talk about the implications of this bill from an opportunity cost frame?

[Prof. Arthur Sweetman]

My basic idea is that right now, the federal government has limited fiscal capacity. I think that before COVID, it had a lot more flexibility, but during the COVID regime, government deficits increased substantially.

If governments are going to be spending large amounts of money, we need to be thinking about where they spend it because they have a limited number of opportunities to spend large amounts of money. They can either spend it on pharmacare or a limited number of other programs. They have to make choices.

My fear is that we're going to end up like we were in the 1990s. I think seniors will remember the 1990s, when we got ourselves into such a bad situation in terms of public deficits that we ended up cutting back health care quite a lot. I don't want to return to those days where we can't afford to fund health care because we spent our public money unwisely.

We need to think about the hard choices we have to make.

The point I was making earlier is that it's true that many low-income seniors are in straitened circumstances—some are facing quite difficult challenges—but seniors are also among the wealthiest, highest-income people in our society. A broad-brush approach that gives money to the wealthiest in our society as well as those with low income in our society is probably not a good use of funds right now.

If it was prepandemic and the government's financial books were in a bit better state than they are now, then I would say that, yes, we can afford to do it.

However, right now it's not clear that we can, so we need to think about our priorities. Would we prefer to have better access to primary care in emergency rooms? Would we prefer to have pharmacare? Would we prefer to have dental care or would we prefer to have a 10% increase in OAS for people between 65 and 75?

Incidentally, my reading of the numbers shows that poverty rates are much higher for people just before they turn 65—in their late fifties and early sixties. They sort of hit a low in their early sixties and then they start to increase, so that by age 75, 85 and 90, they're much higher than they were at 65 to 75.

Almost all of that increase, incidentally, is among females. For males over age 65, the low-income rate is roughly flat as a function of age. For women, it's increasing with age. It really is the women over age 75—it's hard to draw an exact cut-off, but at some more senior age than 65 to 70—who are among the seniors experiencing higher poverty rates.

Having said that, people just short of 65 have higher poverty rates than even those who are 75 to 80. I think we do need to think very carefully about how we're spending our money, especially in these days where we have a limited amount of money in our kitty, as it were.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Professor Sweetman.

You mentioned the 1990s and deficits. It was a Conservative government responsible for those deficits, but I do not want to dwell on that.

I do want to ask you about Conservative policy now. You will be familiar, because you study these sorts of issues, with pay-as-you-go legislation, which was first popularized in the United States.

Mr. Poilievre has proposed doing the same thing with respect to federal spending—as a control for federal spending.

This implies a lot, to say the least, for seniors in this country. I think of it in these terms: Since CPP, the GIS and OAS are, of course, indexed to inflation, from that comes a view that the increases that result from that indexing to inflation could count as new spending, necessitating cuts in other areas, according to the pay-as-you-go formula.

From that, one could say that we could see cuts in other areas, like the New Horizons for Seniors program, which we know has proved tremendously important in helping seniors in a variety of ways.

Do you have concerns about Mr. Poilievre's pay-as-you-go framework for federal spending in the future, should he be elected as prime minister?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Could we have a short answer, please?

[Prof. Arthur Sweetman]

I'm not sure I have a good answer for that.

To a certain extent, all government programs are pay-as-you-go to some degree, and with the deficit and annual debt, they're a way of transferring some proportion of federal spending across years.

Seniors care a lot about their children and grandchildren, and they are concerned about leaving substantial debts to their children and grandchildren, especially when that debt is mostly funding consumption, rather than investment.

If we're thinking about pay-as-you-go, we want to be very careful about whether we're paying for current consumption or whether we're paying for an investment for future generations.

I'd be very happy to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Sweetman.

Ms. Chabot, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the opposition parties for allowing Bill C‑319 to pass through the House. We now have an opportunity to look at some fundamental issues that I hear less about in the discussions between the two parties.

Mr. Poirier-Monette, what is the impact of the fact that a fixed income such as the old age security pension has not been increased for seniors aged 65 to 74?

[Philippe Poirier-Monette]

The impact is seen in the difficult choices being made on a daily basis, such as putting a product back on the shelf at the grocery store or not always buying all the drugs needed for their health. As I was saying earlier, seniors have very high health care costs. I am thinking here of eyeglasses, hearing aids and dental care, in particular. A dental insurance program has been announced, but we are still waiting for a lot of details on it. We are talking here about expenses that can amount to more than $1,600 a year. As a result, people go without. In addition to harming their health and compromising their autonomy, that generates societal costs. I think that has to be taken into consideration.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

You had previously mentioned that financial insecurity has no age; now you've just illustrated it.

We talk a lot about the cost of living, but it is also important to consider people on a fixed income. That is one of your concerns.

Do you have any other solutions to propose? You talked about increasing the guaranteed income supplement and revising the indexing method, but would there be anything other than those two measures?

[Philippe Poirier-Monette]

The proposal to increase the maximum earnings exemption for the guaranteed income supplement is a very good measure. The government has already increased it in the past, and we have applauded that decision every time. Because of the way it is designed, the guaranteed income supplement is a tax trap, a trap that leads to poverty. When the amount of earnings exceeds $5,000, people lose 50¢ of every dollar they earn, which discourages them from working and prevents them from getting out of poverty. So raising the cap is necessarily a good measure.

In addition, a tax credit for experienced workers was to be implemented. As Ms. Tassé-Goodman said, increasing the maximum earnings exemption for the guaranteed income supplement would still be a step in the right direction, especially in a context where it is difficult to live and where there is a labour shortage.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Chabot.

Madame Zarrillo, you have two and a half minutes.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

I have a motion today, because I note that both Madame Tassé-Goodman and Mr. Janeiro talked about the caregiver tax credit. I move:

That the committee write to Minister Freeland to highlight her mandate to convert the Canada Caregiver Credit to a refundable tax-free benefit, and ask that it be part of the upcoming Spring budget so that Canadians who care for their loved ones are also looked after.

We've heard a lot of talk today about the financial stress of caregivers and how much pressure is on them, so I'm hoping we won't need a vote and we can just advance this letter writing to the minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Madame Zarrillo, we have not received the required notice for the motion. If you want to do it in both official languages, we can debate it at that time.

You did not provide the committee with notice, as far as I am aware. These are the rules the committee adopted.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

That's fine.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I guess I just wanted to close out on housing. We are really seeing a disproportionate amount of seniors losing their housing and rent is getting out of control.

I wonder if I could just ask.... You probably only have less than a minute each.

Mr. Poirier-Monette, would you mind just sharing what you've seen around housing costs for seniors and the impacts of that?

Mr. Janeiro, could you just finish on that?

[Philippe Poirier-Monette]

Thank you very much for the question.

Every week in Quebec, we see cases of people living in private seniors' residences, or RPAs, whose rent costs are increasing exponentially. Every service costs an arm and a leg. It's very expensive. The problem is that RPAs have a large share of the market and have a bit of the upper tier.

At the Réseau FADOQ, we suggest that there be healthy diversity in congregate living settings for seniors. Non-profit housing organizations could also provide services to seniors. Everything must not be done only in the private sector with only people of means being able to go to these residences. So that has to be taken into account.

The public system can do it, but there is also a way to have private cooperatives and NPOs in the sector. That would help a lot of people who don't have the income needed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you.

Give a short answer, Mr. Janeiro.

[James Janeiro]

As Canadians, we're unique in the industrialized world in that the housing bill is the first bill we pay. We don't typically get behind on mortgage or rent and things like that if we can avoid it.

Unfortunately, the impact is that everything else suffers. The grocery bill suffers, buying medication suffers and that sort of thing.

If you're a caregiver, on average you're about $5,000 to $6,000 a year out of pocket already because of your care responsibilities. If you stack increasing housing costs on top of the second bill that you probably pay the most, which is supporting the person you love, everything else gets pinched all that much more.