Mr. Speaker, actually, in the last Parliament when this bill was before the House and it went to committee, I was asked by the office of the finance minister of the day to meet with some of his officials and finance department officials. I heard the same thing that I heard many times in the chamber during that debate. One of the things they had raised with some amount of concern was that a Canadian who collects Canada pension plan living next door to a Canadian who collects a U.S. social security cheque, the Canadian who collects the U.S. social security cheque is already getting a 15% benefit and this would create a situation somehow of greater inequality.
I challenged the members at that time or certainly had challenged the thinking under that.
First, no one has ever complained that the senior citizen living next door was receiving a much better benefit than they themselves were getting. There is no great clamour in the streets. Nobody is saying that we need to raise their taxes to create a situation of equality.
Second, this is going back and addressing a wrong that was created. We need to go back and revisit this issue and make the proper change for those seniors.
I take the position that raising taxes on somebody after they have retired is something cruel and it must be reversed.
If we want to create a situation of greater tax equity between two neighbours living next door to each but collecting a different pension benefit, maybe we should be looking at lowering the inclusion rate for taxation for seniors who collect the Canada pension plan. I would say that is a much healthier way of creating a situation of tax equity rather than creating harm on a particular group and raising their taxes to create equality.