Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating my colleague. Once again, she has shown just how much she cares for society's most vulnerable members.
I would like to revisit the issue of seniors who almost never received the guaranteed income supplement even though they were entitled to it. In some cases, they were entitled to the full amount. My colleague was not in this House when our colleague who has since left us, Mr. Gagnon, began his crusade to identify seniors who had not received the guaranteed income supplement they were entitled to.
In my previous life as an accountant, my regular clients sent me their parents' or their old aunts' tax returns, and I noticed that those people were entitled to the guaranteed income supplement. Lots of seniors were entitled to the guaranteed income supplement, but they never asked for it. And the government never pointed it out to the people who sent in their tax returns. Even though it knew that these people should have been receiving the guaranteed income supplement, the government never gave it to them.
I had the opportunity to hold a meeting in my riding. Nearly 400 people—either seniors or people caring for seniors—attended. We did the math, and in some cases, we found that people would have been entitled to the supplement from the time it was created up until about four years ago. This would have been a lot of money for these people, as much as $90,000 in today's dollars. The government took away these people's rights.
Do you know what this means to seniors who are only collecting old age pension but who should be getting the guaranteed income supplement? It means isolation and a life of poverty. They cannot go out because they cannot afford to. They live shut in, especially if they do not have any family. This is an injustice.
Despite the $13 billion surplus, the Liberal and Conservative governments have not agreed to give these people back everything they sacrificed to directly finance the government. The $13 billion was used to pay off some of the debt. The real debt we owe is to these seniors who were cheated of their guaranteed income supplement.
I would like to ask my colleague why the Conservative government is doing this. Perhaps they are just following the example set by the Liberal Party when it was in power. Why do these people not want to pay the debt they owe our seniors?