Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Scarborough Centre will know that one of the significant demographic developments over the course of the last generation and going forward is that we cannot talk about seniors as people we put on display in a museum. We are talking about 15% of the population. These are people who have already made great contributions to the country and took seriously the government's recommendation that they begin to save for this period in their life by making investments in companies that would structure themselves in a fashion that they would provide a reliable source of income for seniors in their later years.
Over the course of this last generation, not only has the percentage of seniors in our society increased, but the number of people making contributions to the growth of the GDP has, by reflection, diminished. They now find themselves in a situation where the Government of Canada made specific promises to provide them with certain stability in their later years and then, with one wretched, sneaky move, took $35 billion out from under them.
Can anyone imagine being in one's 70s or 80s and watching one's life-savings snatched away, dismissed by the Minister of Finance and the Conservative Prime Minister who said that his government was doing this because it had to make a tough decision? It was too bad for seniors who were at the most vulnerable period of their life. It was more important for the government to spin the message that it could make the tough decisions, although stupid, but it demonstrated its toughness, although heartless. The government was absolutely disinterested in the future of the Canadian collective.
Welcome to the Conservative world that erodes away the values that make us a cohesive society, that erodes away all of the values that make us a thriving economic unit and that thumbs its nose at the mock parliamentary process that permitted people to get to where they are.