Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in support of this bill put forward by the member for Laval—Les Îles, who has obviously put together something that will be very helpful to a lot of the poorest of Canadians.
That is part of what the NDP has pledged to do in all of its years of existence: to ensure that the poorest of Canadians are looked after, that we are not placing wrongful burdens on people in our society, and that we are dealing with the poorest citizens and, in particular, the poorest seniors in a way that is humane, thoughtful and reasonable. That is what this bill is.
Being poor in Canada ought not to be a crime, but sometimes poor people are penalized for things most Canadians take for granted. It could be something as simple as prepaying funeral expenses as part of looking after themselves and their families in the future.
We sometimes forget the daily constraints faced by poor people, the three million or so Canadians who live below Canada's poverty line. That is one of the worst records in the G7. Finding enough money after paying the rent is a daily challenge. Too often they do not have enough money to feed their children or to look after their health or their future. It is a sad reality that in a country as rich as ours, hundreds of thousands of people need help putting food on the table and have to rely on food banks. This is a shame and a travesty.
It is said that the inevitable things in life are death and taxes. I will not talk about the tax increases in the last federal budget, which will hurt poor people more than most, but there is a cost to dealing with the practicalities of death, which are funeral expenses. The most prudent way to deal with these expenses is through a prepaid funeral plan. Death comes to poor people as it does to anyone else, but why should the poor be penalized for enlisting in a prepaid funeral expense plan? That is exactly what the government does to elderly people who, because of their poverty, qualify for the guaranteed income supplement as part of old age security.
Let us understand this. For a single senior to qualify for GIS, income must be below $16,500 a year, and for a couple, it must be below $21,888 a year. Let us face it: at those income levels, people are poor. Why, then, does the government penalize those same seniors when they withdraw a bit of money from their RRSPs to pay for the inevitable, their funerals, by cutting their GIS benefit? That is what the current law does, and that is simply penalizing the poor. The irony is astounding.
This bill would allow those same seniors to prepay their funeral expenses with money from an RRSP. This makes sense. It does absolutely nothing to change the living conditions of seniors. This is, in fact, a prudent course of action, a humane, rational, reasonable and emotional course of action to protect their families in the future from having to deal with part of the tragedy of their deaths. Some of the expenses and emotional turmoil will have been taken care of by the seniors themselves. Who better could decide how to do that?
Having an RRSP is not a crime in this country. Some seniors have RRSPs. The government encourages savings through RRSPs, and 47% of seniors on OAS have an RRSP. Surely being poor and dying, as we all do, is not a crime. Using a modest sum of $2,500, a very small amount of money in the grand scheme of things, to pay for funeral expenses should never be considered income in the hands of a senior, but that is what the government is suggesting it is and that is, in fact, the case now. If seniors withdraw $2,500 to prepay funeral expenses, that withdrawal becomes income in that year.
Did they themselves receive a benefit from that $2,500? Did they go out and buy a new TV or an old clunker of a car? Did they do anything to improve their lot in life? No. They are protecting their loved ones from the problems that will face them with when those individuals pass away, and that is not something that should be counted as income. That is what this bill proposes in the calculation of the future GIS.
Luckily, I am not the only one who sees the irony. A single senior with an annual income of $16,000 a year could not afford this any other way. Nobody is going to be able to afford to prepay funeral expenses without dipping into their RRSPs.
The bill stands on its own merits. It is a clear example of a commitment we in the NDP have made to reduce poverty among seniors. I need not remind the government that the NDP, in fact, voted against the budget in 2011 because it did not actually take all seniors out of poverty. Jack Layton and the NDP had suggested to the government, in 2010, in 2009, in 2008, that we needed to deal with that. The government only did a half-measure, which was to raise the level of the GIS, but it was nowhere near enough to get all seniors out of poverty. Then the next year, it took all the money back by telling seniors they could not retire until they are 67 anyway, and actually take more than that money back. We have a government that gives with one hand and takes back with the other.
The irony of this situation is that these seniors are the poorest of the poor in the seniors' world, yet the government will, as the parliamentary secretary has already said, vote against the bill on the basis of some fabricated cost. Some of the government members will anyway. It is a private member's bill and the vote is up to each individual member.
In fact, only those seniors who have an RRSP and only those seniors who decide to do this will benefit, but they will not actually benefit. What will happen is the government will continue to pay them what it has paid them already. Therefore, we are not talking about a cost. We are talking about a reduction in tax savings that the government is taking from these seniors. It is taking money out of the pockets of seniors who do this in the year following their use of this money to prepay their funeral expenses. That is what the government is currently doing. It is taking money out of the pockets of seniors.
We are suggesting that these are the poorest of seniors to begin with. We should not be taking money out of their pockets in subsequent years. The minister has suggested this is an outrageous and exorbitant amount of money. Our calculations are about 1,000 times less than the minister's own calculations. I feel our calculations are much more accurate and more closely reflect what it would mean when it stopped taking money out of the pockets of seniors.
We are not suggesting this money should not be taxable. If a seniors withdraw money from their RRSPs, none of those rules would change. There is no huge administrative expense to this. There is no enormous burden. This is a simple and effective way to allow seniors to plan their death. This is something all seniors should be able to do with dignity, just as the rest of Canadians do.
We firmly believe this is part of an overall policy of ensuring that the people who built this great country, our seniors, are in fact looked after in the best and most humane way. We have been unsuccessful in convincing the government to lift them all out of poverty and we have been unsuccessful so far, however, in 2015 we will change that, in convincing the government to back off on making them wait until they are 67 before they get any of this money. That two-year wait will cause untold harm on a number of seniors in our country.
However, we can, and should, take this simple and straightforward approach and this simple and straightforward forward measure of ensuring that seniors who want to plan their death have the ability to do so without it costing them out of pocket the following year as the government takes the money back.