I interpret that question to be very broad.
For those of you who don't know my background, I'm a mathematician by training, a statistician. I use numbers to try to see the world.
I have done recent work on the income disparities of Canadians. It's not so much that the poor are worse off than they were in the past—I don't think you can sustain that argument over the last 30 years—but the top 30% or 40% are certainly pulling away; there's no doubt that this has happened.
If you look at the broad federal programs that are important for protecting vulnerable Canadians—that's the EI program—the short observation is that benefits have been cut by about one-third in the last 20 years. For the poor they've been cut by a half. That's self-evident.
On the child tax benefit and the idea of increased support for poorer families with children, I'm absolutely on-side 100%. It's too bad that Mr. Battle is not here, but I'm forced to observe that it was designed in a way so that people on welfare would not benefit from the increased benefits in the child tax benefit. The provinces are running social assistance, and the federal government chose to remove human rights protections. There used to be something called the Canada Assistance Plan, and the federal funding was contingent on meeting certain standards. That was eliminated in 1995.
I've been doing a great deal of work over the last 10 years on benefits for seniors, on OAS and the guaranteed income supplement. Let me use this opportunity to observe that the average income of a senior in Canada who retires without an employer pension plan is $15,000, and 80% of them have an income below $20,000. If I go back over the last 25 years that I've been doing this kind of work in this town, I can think of only one program that might have increased the income of poor seniors. Old age security has been indexed to CPI since before 1985, and there have been no increases other than that for 25 years. GIS, which is targeted to low income, was increased by $35 a month about four years ago. That's the only increase in the guaranteed income supplement's purchasing power in the last 25 years.
In the same period, the RRSP limits have gone from about $4,000 to $22,000. We've had pension income-splitting provisions that will benefit seniors who are well enough off to worry about income taxes. We've had increases in the age credit and tax deductions that will benefit seniors who are lucky enough to be paying income tax. But for those who are retiring on $15,000 a year, $35 a month is the total increase in the federal support over the last 25 years.
So of course you have an increase in disparity. It is inevitable from that 25-year history.
You saw The Globe and Mail headline, maybe six months ago, indicating that the increase in the average earnings of people who work full-time for the full year was, over the last 20 years, $53 a year—it was less than $100. Why have we had huge GDP growth, huge productivity growth, huge increases in corporate profits over the last 25 years and no increase in the purchasing power of wages? What has happened with the dynamic of the conflict between employers and employees in negotiating a wage for my time?
Certainly, amongst people who know this material much better than I, the “voluntary quit” regulation that said that if you leave your job you will not be eligible for EI—that you'll get nothing under EI if you leave your job voluntarily, or if I fire you, you'll get nothing out of EI—has affected the competitive position between employers and employees.