Mr. Speaker, that is what is perverse about this budget. It pits groups of seniors against each other. The hon. member rightly identifies that single seniors are up the creek on this budget. Worse still, when seniors are married, get the split for a year and then their spouses die, its bingo time for them. Not only do they have to deal with the grief of losing their partners, but they now have to pay an additional amount of tax. As I said in my speech, this is a perverse way of grief counselling.
What is frustrating is that this could have been done in so many other ways. If we want to deal with the income tax disadvantages of seniors, then we could have created a split system which would start at a certain threshold and end at a certain threshold. That way we would not be pitting one set of seniors against another set of seniors. However, no, the government threw out the pension splitting idea because it had completely balled up on the income trust. The Conservatives lied to the Canadian people repeatedly on the income trust. In order to create a diversionary tactic, they gave seniors income splitting. This is total incompetence and dishonesty to the Canadian people.