Mr. Speaker, I certainly do agree that there are numbers of people who, for whatever reason, were not able to put away enough to provide for their retirement years, for emergencies or for very expensive chronic care assistance, et cetera. This is why it is so very important that we support our social programs.
We need to understand that there are people in our society who are unable to care for themselves, but I can tell the member that this is not the Conservative view. The Conservative view is that everybody has to fend for themselves. That is not right. It is not right to say that if someone cannot take care of themselves then that is their problem. It is not right to say that it is not our problem. We do not want a government that does not support people with a good, solid social program.
As I was indicating with regard to those income trusts, when we take out all the people who have no partner to split with and who are already at the lowest marginal rate, the total percentage of seniors that gets any benefit from income splitting is very small. It is somewhere around 4% of seniors.
What the government did with those income trusts is absolutely outrageous. In regard to the plan to eliminate the 31.5% tax, replace it with a 10% tax and make it refundable to Canadians so that only non-residents of Canada, who are the most significant beneficiaries of this plan, would be paying the tax, that is fair to Canadians. It deals with the problem the finance minister has identified. He did not have to use a 31.5% tax. A 10% tax would have done it. If we do that, I am hoping that we will be able to recover about two-thirds of the lost investment value of the hard-earned savings of seniors, savings that were lost when he imposed that tax.