It would be impossible to give you a dollar figure, but I think it should be at least up to the poverty level. At the moment, your mother—to use the example you gave—who didn't work outside the home and didn't earn a CPP pension, would still be entitled to old age security in her own name, without reference to her labour force participation, plus GIS. But as I mentioned in my presentation, the total she could get from OAS and GIS if she were a single person is less than the poverty level. It's only about $14,000. So I think that needs to be addressed.
Secondly, to jump a little bit to your point about the caregivers—and this is happening increasingly because of our aging population—let's say a woman at the age of 55 has to withdraw from the paid workforce to care for her elderly husband or a family member who has disabilities. When she claims her retirement pension, she can't claim it before age 60 in any case, but let's say she claims it at 60; she has five years from age 55 to 60 that will have to be included in her average earnings, at zero, which means it's going to bring down the average and she'll get a lower pension.
What I argued in the report, and maybe it wasn't entirely clear, is that she should get the same kind of dropout that is entitled to those who have children under the age of seven. In other words, she would be allowed to exclude those years from the calculation of average earnings on which her pension would be based. That would be a caregiver dropout. I think we need to look at that. It's a recommendation that has been around for a number of years.
As to the question of those who are in the paid workforce—and I said 82% of those in the child-bearing years are now in the paid workforce—we have to recognize that on average they have one and possibly two children, usually not more because of what has changed in the last 30 to 40 years. Plus, generally speaking, they take their full maternity leave, funded by maternity benefits, and they're back at work within two years. So they're not dropping out of the paid workforce for many, many years and not having any pension. They can leave out the years when they had a child under the age of seven, even if they went back to work and had to work part-time. By allowing them to exclude those years, it means that their average earnings are not pulled down when it comes to calculating their pension. So it's a consideration given to women who take time out of the workforce when they have young children. I was arguing that the same consideration should be given to those women who have to come out--