Mr. Speaker, the member made reference to what he called pension income splitting. In fact, it is registered pension income splitting and there is a difference. It means that CPP, OAS and payments out of registered retirement savings plans do not in fact qualify.
The member may be interested to know that only 30% of seniors have registered pension plans and if we take out all of those who do not have a partner to split with and those who already have income at the lowest bracket, below $37,000, splitting will not benefit them. If we take those out, it turns out, according to the Economic Research Council, that only 12% of seniors will in fact benefit from registered pension income splitting.
People bought income trusts. The government then taxed the trusts and immediately announced pension income splitting to somehow offset it, but did not realize that the people who bought income trusts were people who did not have pension plans because they needed to buy something that was going to emulate the cashflow that they needed. I refer the member to our speeches that we have been giving on this issue. Would he please correct the record and understand that splitting of registered pension income is not going to help more than 12% of seniors and none of those people--