Thank you for the opportunity to address this major problem among our retirees.
As mentioned, my name is Alexander Glenn, and I go by the name of Sandy.
I'm a retired member of the RCMP, and the current national president of the RCMP Veterans' Association. The current strength of the association is approximately 5,500 former serving members and employees, along with about 1,000 associate members, mostly being spouses and the vast majority being women. The total number of RCMP retirements in Canada is in the range of about 16,000, but that's a rough estimate.
To address the origins of this situation, as you no doubt are aware, when Canada's Militia Pension Act was passed in 1901, it contained a section now disgustingly referred to as a “gold-digger clause”, which gave the government discretion to deny benefits to widows deemed unworthy. That is a most inappropriate way of thinking in this day and age, especially when you consider that these spouses had been married after the age 60, for 10, 15, 20, and 25 years. That's not unworthy. A widow was denied benefits if she was more than 20 years younger than her husband, or if he married her after the age of 60. It's interesting to note that it predates a woman's right to vote, which was made law in 1916.
The act was drafted this way to protect the Canadian military from deathbed marriages, which were common in the United States. It prompted the Canadian government to assume preventive action. It did have concerns that the same thing was going to happen.
Now consider, in 1901, the average life expectancy for a Canadian male was 50 years of age, and that's according to a 2017 publication by the National Post. I guess it isn't unreasonable to believe that a 60-year-old pensioner at that time could certainly have been in ill health, but today, it isn't that way.
According to a document published by the United Nations entitled “United Nations Human Rights Report 2020”, the prediction was that life expectancy would be in the range of 80.3 years. The national population health survey and the Canadian community health survey estimate that the Canadian male can be expected to live in the range of 79.3 years of age.
Using the deathbed thinking of 1901, I cannot help but believe that this was the thinking of those who drafted today's military RCMP and public service pension plans. It's unreasonable to consider the age of 60 as the probable deathbed circumstance today. Indeed, if this rationale is be applied to today's situation, then change the legislation, so that marriage over the age of 90 will affect the pension, because 90 is 10 years older than the expected life expectancy today. Back in 1901, it was 10 years later than the 50-year expectancy.
I've been serving as president of the RCMP Veterans' Association for almost two years. I must confess that before doing so, I had no idea this legislation existed. However, early into my first term—I'm in my second one now—I began to receive requests for assistance from a number of our association members to make a concentrated effort to get this clause repealed. Not only do those spouses, the vast majority being women, lose a portion of their pension, but sadly, that surviving spouse also loses all medical and dental insurance benefits upon the death of the pensioner.
I cannot imagine the mental stress, and Walt touched on this, that a pensioner who married over the age of 60 must be going through, worrying that his wife of many years is not going to be taken care of when he dies. The spouse doesn't deserve this, nor does the pensioner who gave most of his productive years to serving Canada.
I reached out to RCMP compensation services, and they advised that they were bound by their pension program rules and couldn't make any changes. They did advise me—and this was referred to by Mr. Pizzino—that there is the optional survival benefit, OSB.
Walt referred to this as buying into an additional pension. It's not an additional pension. It means that the pensioner can divert 20%, 30% or 50% of his pension to be used should he predecease his wife, and I say wife because it wasn't until around 2014 that a wife could possibly be in this circumstance with her husband. I'm speaking for the RCMP. Women didn't join the RCMP until 1974.