Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
We have filed a brief in which we attempt to provide an overview of the subject under study. Now I would like to provide some additional information and comments. I was unable to submit my statement earlier as I didn't finish it until yesterday.
I will begin with a word about our coalition.
The Surviving Spouses Pension Fairness Coalition came together in 2013 and 2014, when it recruited a large number of partners wishing to support its objective, which is to help change federal pension statutes. Those partners are associations of retirees including, of course, the Armed Forces Pensioners'/Annuitants' Association of Canada, the National Association of Federal Retirees, which appeared before you on April 29, unions and other organizations. You can access a list of our partners on our website.
The coalition came to public notice as a result of our efforts during the 2015 election campaign. In 2016, we took action to increase awareness among many ministers directly or indirectly responsible for the various pension statutes.
In 2018, we supported the New Democratic Party's bill to amend those acts, and we publicized the petition that supported it.
After a very long pandemic that disrupted political life in this country and considerably reduced our opportunities for action, here we are before your committee.
The part of our brief concerning federal legislation addresses at length the 1901 act, which, among other things, included an exclusionary provision that I want to discuss today. Under that legislation, a widow already receiving a pension who remarried, perhaps as a way to improve her financial position, would lose that pension, which would subsequently be restored if her new husband then died. A similar provision was included in several pension plans over a long period of time, particularly in the Canada pension plan, in which it was in force from 1965 to 1987.
We believe that the "marriage after 60 years" clause is completely arbitrary, and we clearly understand why many people consider it discriminatory, even though the Supreme Court dismissed a complaint to that effect in a judgment in 1994. However, reality changes over time, and the court's opinion could change as well, as we've seen with regard to assisted suicide and medical assistance in dying.
In our brief, we provide a line of reasoning that could be used to justify the "marriage after retirement" provision. Since most marriages after 60 years occur after retirement, we could easily delete the words "after 60 years" and have only one provision for all legislation. Why not?
Now I want to discuss the veterans survivor fund.
In one piece of research, from which I cited some results in the brief, we surveyed 4,490 widows who were alive in 2020. Assuming, for example, that they became widows between 2005 and 2020, and considering that, during that 15-year period, other widows not receiving pensions unfortunately died, several hundreds would be added to the total for that period.
Here are some more figures from that research that may surely be of interest to you.
The incomes of 19% of those widows were below the low income measure.