Mr. Speaker, this measure is designed to do one thing and one thing only, which is to lower the amount of income that is included for the taxation of a benefit. Let us take a number like $15,000. If that were my benefit, instead of having 85% of it eligible to be taxed, we are now only talking about having 50% of it eligible to be taxed.
If we were to apply this to Americans who collect the Canada pension plan, they are taxed as if they were receiving a U.S. social security benefit over there. What this means in their law is that most seniors would not even be paying tax.
The current rate is 85%. In the United States only 6% of seniors would be taxed at the highest level. More than half would not even pay a cent of tax and the rest would be somewhere in between that. If it were 50%, the way it was before, virtually no seniors would be paying tax.