Mr. Speaker, I share the outrage of my colleague from Laval. I appreciate the concern she brings here and the passion with which she portrays it.
If a person owed money to Revenue Canada, Revenue Canada would hound that person to the ends of the earth to get every nickel of that money going back three, four, five, seven years. Yet when the inverse is true and the Government of Canada owes this tiny pittance of money, the guaranteed income supplement, to a senior citizen, it will only pay 11 months in retroactivity. That is some magic figure it has pulled out of the air. After 11 months Canadians are cut off, even if for 20 years they have been shortchanged the money that should be rightfully coming to them. For some reason the government has pulled this convenient figure of 11 months out of the air. It is such a glaring contradiction that it makes my blood boil when I think about it.
I do not understand the logic or the reasoning, other than pure miserly, cheap bitterness on the part of the government that it would deny this money that is rightfully owed to seniors as the guaranteed income supplement. The reasoning the government used--