Evidence of meeting #46 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was tax.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
Certainly, the point you're making is a good one. We should include this in any agenda for a seminar. With respect to people's knowledge about the various plans, it's pretty sad. And many people don't understand, and haven't been able to understand, that they can split their CPP now, and it's to several advantages, and in that case the particular partner gets the cheque.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you.
We will go to round two with five minutes.
We'll go to Mr. Bagnell.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
Thank you for coming.
Just on your comment on the budget vote tonight, it's not a reflection of the Liberals' view on income splitting. There are a whole bunch of other things in the budget that we think are bad, so that will be what we're voting on.
A single woman, in the worst-case scenario, would get old age security and the supplement. Do you have any comparison with what some other countries are doing that's better and that we might adopt for a woman in that position?
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
No, I don't.
Vice-President, Canadian Activists for Pension Splitting
There are income-splitting regimes in different countries that operate slightly differently. I'm not an expert on those; I can't address them. But I know that France has income splitting and the United States does, to a degree.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
On the demographics, the government has just raised the contribution limit from 69 to 71 for everyone. If we were to raise the women's, based on your suggestion, which people seem to appreciate, in a short answer, did you figure out what figure that might be?
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
No. But I can make the comment that it would be an actuarial decision.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
Right.
One of my colleagues had a question about your comment on the retroactive tax adjustment for those left out of income splitting. Could you just explain that in more detail?
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
I'm suggesting that, for instance, if I were to keel over, my proposed widow would be in a bad situation. She would never have enjoyed the pension splitting. And you have to realize that pension splitting isn't a big cost item, for a very big reason: the situation for a person my age--because statistically speaking, I'm already dead--is that once one partner dies, pension splitting disappears. So it isn't a big item, I don't think. But the point is that the widow, my widow, would then never have enjoyed the efforts of my last four years, for instance. In other words, it seems unfair that death has terminated the benefits.
I've had many calls, and CARP has had many letters, from widows. We talk about unattached women. I don't know the statistics, but I think today most of them have been married, and quite often they're widowed. So it's not like the old days. There's the element of “let's look to the future”. And if you have pension splitting, you're going to level the playing field eventually, and that widow, at least, would benefit from the accrued collection or the reserve you can build up in the estate. Because that's what happens. When I die, my pension goes with me.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
Basically what you're saying is that if you keeled over today, and because this law isn't coming into effect tonight, we'd give it to your widow going five years back because we didn't get it five years ago.
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
That's the idea.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
Your other point was about allowing greater flexibility, lower cut-offs, for unattached women to receive GIS and to remove conflicts between drug benefits and the cut-off band. Could you explain that, please?
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
This is partly a provincial thing, I suspect, but as I understand it, and I'm not an expert in the field, when you get the drug benefits, it's added to your income and it can move you into a different category for your supplement. So I don't think there should be inhibitors that reduce the supplement when it's a requirement for your health.
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
And the lower cut-off means that they could actually receive more income before that income is added...cut off their taxes, because of the GIS.
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
Are we talking about the RRIF?
Liberal
Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT
Let me leave that for a minute.
I have one last point. When you talk about a comprehensive review of pension plans to meet the essential needs of older women, what effect is it going to have? One is that we're all living a lot longer now. Are the OAS and CPP taking that into account, or is that what you were asking to review? There is also the fact that income tax went up last July 1 from 15% to 15.5% for seniors and everyone else.
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
I'm looking mostly at the fact that we have these senior women who have suffered this gap, and we should be reviewing anything that allows us to narrow it. It could be that it's very temporary, because I suspect that the next generation of senior women will have some benefits with more education, the women's movement, less discrimination--it's not gone yet. I suspect this will level off.
Liberal
Conservative
Bruce Stanton Conservative Simcoe North, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our panel this afternoon.
It's great to have you here, gentlemen.
I was glad to see in both of your presentations that you spent some time on this whole issue, and this has come up, actually, in previous meetings that our committee has had on this particular topic. This is primarily a widow. It's usually the women who are left alone after their husbands pass away at an earlier age, and what actually happens to their income has been a subject of some debate.
You've unearthed for us here some Statistics Canada information, which is very helpful. I see you've gone on to suggest some issues around which that could be in fact improved on, and hopefully bring some policies that will begin to address that to at least level the playing field. We're looking at a 15% drop in the first year. The average income drops by 15% in that first year.
I was surprised to see that in fact the incidence of seniors living in poverty--5.1% for widowers and 8.7% for widows--wasn't as much of a difference as I thought, to be honest, but I'll just set that aside for a moment.
On that topic, though, I don't know what the year of this Statistics Canada report was. I don't know if it was referenced in there. It looks like it might have been 2004. There had been some other measures that were introduced in Budget 2006 and then again in this budget pertaining to increases in the age amount tax credit, the pension amount credit. Also, in Budget 2007, the increase in the spousal amount, the basic personal exemption--when a couple chooses to do a combined tax return, the dependent spouse gets a full benefit.
Have you done any calculations to see how those additional credits for seniors or pensioners would impact on some of these numbers, in addition to pension splitting?
Vice-President, Canadian Activists for Pension Splitting
No, we have not, from CAPS, to be quite honest.
Chairman, Georgian Bay Chapter, Canada's Association for the Fifty-Plus
No, but I think you're on to something. You have to look at those from this standpoint: does it narrow the gap? We're not sure.
Conservative
Bruce Stanton Conservative Simcoe North, ON
It will be interesting, I think, to see how that plays out. What we have here are some substantive measures that really go to individual earnings ability in that time after, where a widow or a widower has to make ends meet and carry on as a survivor.
That's all I had, Madam Chair. Perhaps my colleague, Madam Smith....