Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for appearing before us. It has been very informative already: $32 billion per year, the program costs.
My questions centre around those older women. I see that rate is declining, and I'm glad to see that, but I guess I think about my mother, who passed away two years ago in her 88th year. She was one of that generation who raised a large family, never “worked”—I say that with quotation marks—in the workforce, but spent her life raising a family and of course made a huge contribution, I think, to society too.
I guess I want to ask those questions. I would like to begin by asking, if we were to take the situation of an individual, of a lady, possibly, who's in her seventies, eighties, or nineties, do we have a way to compare today how they would rate? Are we moving forward? Are we providing more benefits for them? Or are they slipping?
That's my first question.