If the Minister of Finance wants to talk about it, maybe he will rise and ask a question as well.
The member is quite right and I think it bears repeating that seniors have a very unusual situation. Most are on fixed incomes. They have no opportunity to increase their income by their own efforts. They cannot go out to work some more. There are no escalators. Many of them do not even have pension plans that would be indexed, et cetera, so the member is quite right. We have a situation where the income levels do not tend to follow normal inflationary pricing or cost measures.
It raises the question about the GST implications. As the member knows, the GST reduction really is a function of how much we spend, and that if we wanted to get a better break on that, we would actually have to spend more. The more that we are consumers of GST taxable goods and services, the more the savings, so it tends to be a GST cut, I think the member may agree. It tends to be more to the benefit of those who have higher levels of disposable income, and that is generally not what the member has been talking about: seniors in need and seniors on fixed incomes. Certainly, we do understand that.
Generally, in terms of an approach to addressing some of the needs of seniors, should we look more at a programs based or subsidy based type of delivery of the needs for seniors as opposed to general income taxation or commodity taxation measures, which do not seem to hit seniors very effectively?