Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her question and for giving me an opportunity to talk about what our government is doing to eliminate poverty in Canada. This is a very important issue for our government, not to mention for the children of this country.
This issue is not something we needed to be told to act on. We have acted. We have acted across so many fronts. I will, in my short time, try to get all of those actions into a single speech.
First and foremost, the Canada child benefit has lifted close to 900,000 kids out of poverty. We did that in our first year in office, and we have indexed that, so it sustains the progress we have made on that front. That lifts countless children straight out of poverty, and does it in a way that is progressive. It has been celebrated by food banks, by anti-poverty organizations, by Oxfam, and by Campaign 2000 right across the country. It is one of the most progressive new policies in my lifetime in this country.
After that, we immediately started to double the investments to provinces on affordable housing in our first budget and sustained those as we move toward the national housing strategy that was launched last year. The focal point of that is the Canada housing benefit, which comes into place next year. However, in the interim we started building new housing so that when the subsidies arrive, they will arrive at the same time the new housing arrives. On that alone, through the national housing strategy, 500,000 Canadians will be lifted out of core housing needs, once again, alleviating poverty.
When it comes to seniors, the guaranteed income supplement was boosted. Contrary to the presentation we just heard, Canadians are automatically enrolled, and have been since the start of January. It was one of the changes we made prior to introducing the budget. That automatic enrolment has also been applied to the Canada workers benefit, which is a boost in earnings that will no longer be taxed for low-income wage earners who re-enter the workforce. In order to support their re-entry, the Canada workers benefit, which replaces the workers income tax benefit, WITB, is now also automatically applied to anyone who files their income taxes, if they are eligible. That is going to affect close to 20,000 people and impact close to 300,000 people in the country, and lift even more people out of poverty.
On top of all of that, we have also lowered the retirement age back down to 65. That eliminates the potential for hundreds of thousands of Canadians to fall off the cliff upon retirement and end up in poverty.
Additional dollars have come the way the member opposite has asked for, and it is there. Add to that $7.5 billion invested in child care in the first provincial, territorial, and federal government agreement on child care the country has ever seen. We did not wait to spend that in the next five or six years, as the NDP promised under its platform. We did not wait for the provinces to come up with their half of the money before we started spending ours, the $7.5 billion that is being signed in provinces and territories day by day. We only have two provinces left to have the complete package put together. In my province alone, that has delivered 100,000 new, affordable, regulated, and high-quality day care spaces, many of which are in the city I represent.
When we add it all up, whether it is the 900,000 or the 300,000 or the 20,000, or the 70,000 or the 500,000 we have lifted well over a million people out of poverty in our first two years in office, and that is not good enough. Our focus now is getting to the next million and the million after that. Our government will not rest as long as poverty defines too many people's lives in our country, most importantly indigenous kids and racialized people who often bear the most horrific brunt of poverty. We have to do better. We have to make sure every Canadian gets advantaged by the programs we have proudly put in place as the new government.