Madam Speaker, one of the things that all the provinces that have anti-poverty strategies have indicated is that the federal government needs to have an anti-poverty strategy.
In fact, let us look at the report from Ontario's poverty reduction strategy, “Breaking the Cycle”. Again I will mention Deb Matthews, who has done fabulous work on this. She was at the Canadian Social Forum in Calgary a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the work she has done.
She specifically has a chapter in this report entitled “The Federal Role”, because we do live in a country that has federal, provincial, even municipal jurisdictions. There are NGOs and organizations that do a lot of good work, but there has to be leadership at the federal level. This is as true on the senior side as it is anywhere else. For Canada to suggest that we do not need a national anti-poverty strategy is simply wrong. There are things that we can do.
I was very pleased that in the Liberal election platform last year, called “Richer, Fairer, Greener”, one of the recommendations was to increase the guaranteed income supplement by $600 a year for Canada's lowest-income seniors, and by $800 a year for low-income senior couples. It goes on to talk about changing the CPP disability requirements to ensure that those with episodic illnesses, such as MS or others, do not jeopardize their ability to collect CPP or QPP disability benefits.
We have to understand that Canadians are living longer now. That is the good news. That is due to advances in health and welfare. The problem is that a lot of people are not able to afford those later years in spite of the fact that in many cases they planned for it for a long period of time.
We have examples of people, like the Nortel employees, who are facing a very difficult circumstance now that they never planned on. They never thought this would happen to them, and who would blame them? There is stuff happening in Canada to seniors that is simply not fair.
How do we fix it? There are organizations such as CARP. Susan Eng, from CARP, made a very strong presentation to the anti-poverty committee the other day about what she thinks has to happen for seniors. CARP is calling for social change to bring financial security, equitable and timely access to health care and freedom from discrimination for Canada's elderly, ensuring that the marketplace serves the needs and expectations of this generation of persons aged 50 and over, and building a sense of community and shared values. It calls for more relief for retirees and better protection of seniors. Like many others, it is saying that the GIS is the perfect thing to invest in and we should increase the GIS.