Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll be very brief.
Last week we had Professor Lynn McDonald here. She talked about women who experience forced retirement. These are women who are caregivers for their children or for infirm spouses or for relatives they need to provide care for. They are also women who are forced to retire because of their own health issues.
They may wish to come back into the job market after their caregiving days are done, but their skills are out of date or they're perceived as being too old to come back, so they're pushed into retirement before they're ready. As a result, their CPP is most definitely not adequate, and they're reduced to living on OAS and GIS. The cut-off in terms of OAS and GIS is about $12,000 a year. That's what you get if you don't have CPP, and yet the low-income cutoff is $18,000.
In terms of the CPP, I know there's a flexibility there. If you retire early, you take a 5% penalty; if you stay late, you have a 6% reward. The government is currently looking at perhaps changing this by increasing the penalty if you retire early and increasing the incentive at the other end if you stay later.
It seems to me that these women who are forced into early retirement are caught in a trap. Would you comment on that, and perhaps suggest a way to ensure that women aren't victimized by this proposed change? Is there a way of increasing the incentive for delaying retirement without this penalty at the end?