Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my NDP colleague from Hamilton for the tireless work that she has been doing on behalf of seniors, being, if I may say, a lone voice, in many cases, in the House of Commons reminding us of the need to be true and to keep faith with the seniors of our country and to represent their needs in times like this when we are debating a bill such as this.
She raised the alarming figure regarding the incidence of poverty among seniors in spite of genuine efforts in the last couple of decades to address and eradicate the embarrassingly high incidence of poverty among seniors.
There is one mitigating factor that I would raise and ask her to comment on. In the first Conservatives' budget, they did not reduce taxes for low income seniors. They actually raised taxes to low income seniors in two ways. First, the lowest tax rate went from 15% to 15.5%, a seemingly small amount but significant when one is living hand to mouth. The second thing they did was to lower the basic personal exemption for everyone by $400 a year.
If a person is collecting another pension from another source, which may have been offset by a break they gave to pensioners of $1,000, but if one's sole source of income is OAS and guaranteed income supplement and the basic personal exemption was reduced by $400, it means one is paying taxes on $400 more per year. When I work that out at 15.5% it amounts to about $62.50. That does not sound like much per year but that is $5 a month and, because it happened July 1, the Conservatives doubled it for the six months of the year, which makes it $10 a month. That is half of a week's groceries for a person living on GIS and OAS.
Would the member comment on the double whammy that actually affected seniors when the Conservatives put their hands in their pockets and raised the taxes of our lowest income Canadians?