Mr. Speaker, I have a very tough question for my colleague. Before I pose it I wonder if we are not really talking about some kind of sense of security for Canadians. The movement of this bill is as quickly through the House as the Liberals can do it. We are not about to let that happen because we want Canadians to see the duplicity of this government and the way it tries to sneak these things through.
We are doing this because we are concerned that Canadians at all income levels should have the ability to be able to plan for their futures. I will touch back on this bill in a second but I cite by way of example the way the government went about changing the time rules. It rolled age 71 back to age 69 under the RRSPs, thereby effecting a $40 million or $50 million tax grab from unsuspecting seniors.
Typically, not always, seniors who would have RRSPs might be in the middle to the upper end income bracket. Those people are now faced with the situation of having to make major changes to the way their incomes as retirees will be coming to them. They have had to do a complete revision. The net result of this supposedly no tax government is the fact that the government will incidentally end up with another $30 million to $50 million.
Those are the middle income people. The concern I have in this instance is with the people at the bottom end. Those are the people who were approaching me in my office. I believe the member for Etobicoke North also admitted that these were the people who were approaching him. They are the people at the bottom end of the scale who suddenly had the rug yanked out from under them.
The very tricky question I have for my colleague is does he have any idea at all why in the world the finance minister, having realized that he had completely goofed and made a major mistake, would not have immediately changed this legislation? Why now after virtually two years is he finally getting around to doing this, restoring a small semblance of order to the lives of these very low income people? Why in the world would he have waited so long?