Thank you, Madam Chair.
Welcome to all of you and thank you very much, in particular to Madam McGowan, who is from my riding and with an organization that is 30 years old, I believe, and very well recognized and respected in the community.
I'll start with you, because I've always felt—just from going in the buildings and going into the nursing home when my father was ill—that women were by far the largest percentage of retired, but you've given us quite an astounding figure, 75%. Not only are they the largest number surviving, but they're also the poorest of the people surviving. Generally what happens when the husband dies is that the income goes down, and some women have had to give up their homes or at least are isolated in their homes, and, as you've said, are quite—
I know a great deal of what you've said, and I accept it and I understand it. I wanted to ask, though, in the last budget, for instance, there's a splitting of pensions that can happen, but if you're a couple already today without the splitting, I know that couples can live much more comfortably or a bit better off even if their income is not as high because they're sharing. A single person, a man or a woman—in this case most of them are women—on a reduced pension is even worse off.
Is there any other thing that you would suggest, in addition to, of course, the things that you've mentioned, such as housing and long-term care? At the moment we do not have a national long-term caregiver program, and I wondered if you might comment on whether that would be needed to set some standards or some drive.
In terms of income support, one of the things I suggested was that there be not so much income splitting as pension splitting, so when the couple are both ready to retire, the pensions are split so that the women receive 50% of their household pension right from the start, rather than losing it when the husband passes on.
Could you comment on those two things as one of two ways, anyway, of helping out?