Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's question regarding the guaranteed income supplement for senior Canadians. Those who qualify for the guaranteed income supplement are the poorest of the poor. People are not eligible until they are at a very, very low level of income.
When we learned that the government was aware of some 300,000 people who qualified for the GIS but were not receiving it, we leaped into action. With the cooperation of colleagues from the Bloc, we forced the Liberal government of the day to remedy that situation by at least making more seniors aware of the eligibility for the GIS.
However, then there was the retroactivity. Some of them were not collecting the benefit for which they were eligible for 10 or 11 years, but the retroactivity was only 11 months. My colleague is correct. With such a huge budgetary surplus, why not change the lives of these low income seniors in a dramatic way by giving them the money they were eligible for all along?
Here is my question on a lot of poverty issues, whether it is first nations poverty or the child poverty that we experience in our own ridings. If not now, when? If not now, when there is a $10 billion budgetary surplus to elevate the social conditions of low income Canadians, then when? Let us imagine the unrealized potential of a child who grows up without the basics needed to flourish. Let us imagine the lost opportunity of these kids who do not have adequate housing or basic nutrition and who have basic needs.
For heaven's sake, 10 record surplus budgets in a row and it is still not time to address basic social needs, but it is time to give even further tax cuts to the biggest and most profitable corporations in the country? There is something fundamentally wrong with the way the Conservatives think. They are missing it.