Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to speak in the House to this bill. It is a very important issue for the New Democratic Party caucus and something I take very seriously.
The greatest influence on my life was my grandmother who came from the Hawkhill in Dundee. She was a miner's widow in Timmins and pretty much raised me. My grandmother was very passionate about seniors' issues. She used to talk about what she called the “poor wee wifies”, the immigrant mining women whose husbands died. There were no pensions in those days. Women faded into the background in any mining town across northern Ontario and northern Quebec and lived in poverty. My grandmother always spoke about the dignity of senior citizens. In fact, my grandmother was the first New Democrat I knew because every month when she got her seniors cheque, she would come upstairs and tell me that the NDP fought for the pension. That is where I learned some of my first lessons.
We are in support of this bill going forward because this comes out of the New Democratic Party election platform of 2011. We know that the Conservative trolls study our election platform very closely, except that they mostly try to misrepresent it, get things wrong, make things up and say absolute complete untruths about all manners of things in it. However, they finally read something in our platform, which is what we have been pushing for, a strategy on elder abuse. Unfortunately, they could not concentrate enough to notice that we had a much broader platform for dealing with seniors issues, something they have dropped the ball on entirely.
We are now dealing with only one piece of the puzzle. There are elements of it that are important but we need to look at the issue of elder abuse in terms of the larger picture, which are the issues that we in the New Democratic caucus have talked about, such as protecting pensions. When I first heard that the government would protect senior citizens, I thought they would protect them from people stealing their pensions, like what has happened under the OAS. We in the New Democratic caucus believe that senior citizens deserve the right to retire at 65 and that they are not a problem, unlike the Prime Minister who told the millionaires in Davos that, in his view, Canada had a problem and that problem was senior citizens. That is a very shameful thing to say and I am shocked that he said it to the Davos millionaires and did not have the nerve to say it to Canadian seniors when he was campaigning.
We believe that we need adequate pensions, which is a base issue. We believe we need proper social housing for seniors, especially in large rural ridings like mine where seniors are living in old farmhouses that have oil tanks that they cannot afford to fill, where their kids have moved south and there is no proper social housing for them. If they do get into social housing, their entire pensions go toward paying room and board and they have nothing else to live on, which means that their quality of life is then affected. We need to ensure that seniors can move into proper housing with the proper supports and sufficient pensions to live their lives with dignity.
We believe there needs to be a strategy for palliative care and for support for families dealing with loved ones who have dementia or Alzheimer's. We hear many horror stories of elder abuse but the real stories are the small ones, the friction that happens within families because of the pressures they are under when they do not have the resources to help a loved one, a father or mother, suffering from dementia. These are the issues that affect Canadians on a day-to-day basis. The government can certainly pull horror stories of abuse off of the back pages of newspapers. They exist and we certainly believe the Criminal Code should be brought to bear, but, more often than not, abuses happen because of the kind of pressure families are under and we need a coherent plan to address that.
The other issue that seniors face is fraud, which the ethics committee has been studying. We know that data breaches are happening that actually profile individuals. There are massive cyber gangs in Ukraine, Nigeria, et cetera, that are actually able to target individual seniors because of data breaches. We all have a responsibility to look at that. I want to praise my colleagues in all parties on the ethics committee for the work being done to address this. Seniors are using the Internet more and more and we know that fraudsters are targeting them, so we need a coherent strategy to protect them from fraud.
There is a sense of humiliation and shame if people have been defrauded. They do not want to tell their kids that they lost some money or that they got caught up in one of these scams. These scams are really sophisticated and they are getting more sophisticated now because of their ability to gather individual data from citizens. That is another issue that needs to be added in when we look at this.
We are talking about the need to deal with elder abuse. Elder abuse happens in a number of forms. It happens in the form of criminal violence and in the form of the same kind of abuses we see against other victims, but it is also different because, in many ways, it is familial. Simply saying that we will increase mandatory minimum sentences for this kind of crime is a blunt instrument. If there is serious abuse happening, of course we want the judges to have whatever discretion they need to render the sentence that is due, but more often than not, we are seeing, within familial relations, the kinds of pressures that are financial and the kinds of pressure with a loved one.
I remember my wonderful grandfather, MacNeil, my mother's father, who was a brilliant man. He had never gone to school but he was a hard-working miner. He started to suffer dementia as he got older, which had an effect on my grandmother who was trying to look after him in a little house in Timmins without family around and without support. Those are the kind of pressures that we see and seniors see.
There has been a number of great organizations, the health authorities that have come forward, and the work that the palliative care committee did on these issues that we can draw from and actually come together within all parties and look at a coherent strategy.
I want to talk about the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, CARP. CARP has done excellent work in advocating for seniors. Susan Eng spoke out saying:
As a society, we're now far more open to talking about the hidden crimes of spousal abuse and child abuse. Now we need to do the same for elder abuse. …the current law is clearly not robust enough to signal society's abhorrence for this crime.
I think this is something on which we would all agree. In fact, the New Democratic Party is very proud of the work of CARP.
We noticed recently that CARP was attacked by the Conservative government for being what it called a partisan front. I personally find it shocking that an organization that does such good work on behalf of seniors would be attacked by the government. However, it was attacked because the government was feeling the heat on its decisions to steal the pension of seniors under the OAS revisions. I will quote the words of our leader, the leader of the official opposition. He said:
CARP is not to blame for the backlash Conservatives are getting from seniors. The Prime Minister is to blame.
When we hear CARP speaking to issues of elder abuse or to issues of financial security for seniors, we all need to take note. It is a serious issue.
The issues that we are dealing with in terms of support at the family level, the federal government has really been missing in action. The provinces are doing what they can but we have seen the quality of care dropping year after year. It is not the fault of the people working in the homes but we see the inability of seniors to get home care. We see within the institutions the pressure that the nurses and the caregivers are under, and so support starts to drop. That is where people end up having the accidents, the broken hips, the injuries that just destroy whatever quality of life they have remaining. It is the gaps in the system that start to form and the victims are the seniors. Then, within this, is the other element of elder abuse.
A couple of years back in Timmins, we held a forum on Alzheimer's. The issue of Alzheimer's and the need for a national coherent strategy on Alzheimer's is another piece of the puzzle. I am not saying that people who have Alzheimer's will be victimized, but there is pressure on families, especially families in crisis when an individual has Alzheimer's and the lack of a coherent strategy. There is also the issue of dementia, especially when the dementia has not been recognized yet. These are things we all need to look at in terms of how we ensure that we have the proper resources, whether it is at the federal level or at the provincial level.
The New Democrats will be supporting taking the bill to committee. We do believe there are some problems with the bill. Obviously, there are some problems with the bill, it is a Conservative bill. Problem is their middle name.
We want to address and fix some of the problems with the bill but we think it is important to send the message that elder abuse is an abhorrent crime. We need to give families the support they need to ensure that senior citizens, or anyone as they age, have the support they need to live in the dignity they deserve.
