Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to participate in the debate tonight on the motion brought forward by the member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques on the old age security system. This motion is very timely.
This afternoon I tabled yet another petition in the House signed by hundreds more seniors, asking the government to pay them the money they were owed as a result of the StatsCan error in calculating the cost of living increase. Seniors were shortchanged on their public income supports because of this error. In calling on the government to reimburse them, they are simply asking for fairness. Yet the government is refusing to act.
If the government will not give seniors the benefits to which they are already entitled, I am not optimistic that it will contemplate enhancements to those benefits. However, I nonetheless believe that this is a critically important debate.
Unlike the parliamentary secretary, the Prime Minister cannot script me. Nor can he prevent me from speaking up on behalf of seniors. In fact, that is why I was elected to the House, to represent the views of the residents of Hamilton Mountain and to ensure that their concerns were being championed in the single most important democratic institution in this nation.
All politicians pay lip service to the fact that seniors built our country. They talk about needing to ensure that seniors can retire with dignity and respect and that they deserve that dignity and respect.
Let me tell the House what is happening to seniors, not just in my community, but across the whole country. With each passing year, it becomes more and more apparent that seniors are falling farther and farther behind. They have worked hard all their lives, they have played by the rules, but now everywhere they turn, every bill they open, they are paying more and getting less.
It is a fact that increases in the cost of living hits seniors disproportionately harder than any other segment of the population. When StatsCan determines the annual cost of living, upon which adjustments are based, its basket of goods includes things like plasma TVs, IPods, computers, all goods which are coming down in price and reducing the cost of living figures. Those also are not goods that poor seniors are buying. The items they are spending money on are essentials like heat, hydro, food and shelter, all of which have been going up and up.
In a series of polls that were conducted by the Canadian Labour Congress in 2004, 73% of Canadians polled said that they were worried about not having enough money to live after retirement, up by almost 20% from just two years before.
Canadians are worried about the solvency of their private pensions and the adequacy of both CPP and public income supports. Those fears are well-founded. Since the middle 1990s, the income of seniors has reached a ceiling and the gap between the revenues of seniors and those of other Canadians is now increasing.
According to the government's National Advisory Council on Aging, between 1997 and 2003 the mean income of seniors' households increased by $4,100, while the average income of other Canadian households increased by $9,000. The situation is even more pronounced for seniors living alone.
Private retirement savings are concentrated in a very small percentage of families. According to StatsCan, 25% of families hold 84% of these assets, while three out of ten families have no private pensions at all.
We find ourselves in a situation now where, across Canada, we have over a quarter of a million seniors living in poverty. That is hardly retirement with dignity and respect.
What is the government doing to address this issue? In fact, I would argue, precious little. We have now had two throne speeches, two budgets and one economic update from the government and none of them left seniors with anything about which to cheer.
We did not get universal drug coverage, no improvements to health care or long term care, no national housing strategy and no review of public income supports. The only people cheering were the Liberals who supported the Harper government's first throne speech and let the most recent mini-budget pass—