Mr. Speaker, it is indeed an honour to speak to the bill. I would also like to report on my homework over the last two weeks listening to seniors and persons with disabilities who are indeed the experts on what the issue of old age security actually means, and what a fair and meaningful pension plan would mean for them.
It is quite interesting in terms of the housekeeping details that are in the bill that most people are very comfortable with this. People should not have to reapply for GIS, as we have known and as the important work of Richard Shillington has demonstrated. However, there are still too many seniors entitled to things such as guaranteed income supplement who are not yet receiving it.
We need to not only put things in a bill that explain a different entitlement, but we need to ensure that we are doing the outreach and apply sufficient resources to the department and regional offices to find those seniors who are entitled to these benefits but not yet receiving them. It includes helping them understand the importance of filling out their tax returns such that they can not only receive the guaranteed income supplement but also their GST rebate and a number of other things that are part of our security net here in Canada.
It was very inspiring however at the end of last week to be in St. John's, Newfoundland at the fabulous Aging Issues Network Conference funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It was interesting that the issues around seniors and issues they care about keep coming up across this country. I will particularly this afternoon refer to what I have learned in Yukon, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador.
It was exciting to see the original overview for the workshop in St. John's. It began with a quote from the Minister of Ageing in South Australia who said: “We must stop thinking old. The ageing of many countries...is one of the most significant social trends of our time...it gives us a unique opportunity”.
This was brilliantly described by the Liberal renewal commission in Dr. Austin Bowman's report in his summary where he defined seniors as persons 65 of age and older, which is indeed 13% of the Canadian population and represents about four million individuals.
It is estimated, as the hon. member for Mississauga South said, that these seniors over the next years will comprise 25% of our population. They have accumulated a vast wealth of skills, experience and maturity which represent an enormous investment on the part of their employers and Canadian society in general. These extensive human resources should be available for the betterment of Canadian society and with declining birth rates may be required to keep our Canadian economy valued.
We know, however, that the security of seniors across this country is not even. In certain provinces only seniors already receiving GIS get the benefit of a pharma care program. It is only in Atlantic Canada where there is no such thing as a catastrophic drug plan. Seniors worry about different aspects of their security in different ways across the country.
The theme I heard most often was on the issue of affordable housing and the kinds of changes that would be required. There is a real need of an innovative and creative method of marrying the need for affordable housing with the need for social inclusion.
We know that social inclusion is now as important as smoking in terms of health outcomes. When I was in medical school, we referred to them as shut-ins, people who actually did not have the ability to get out and be with one another. Those people's health outcomes are indeed diminished.
I was sad to hear from the seniors in Whitehorse, at a time when they were celebrating the Canada Games, that a group of them had come together with the Legion and with other NGOs to buy an old hotel for them to all to come together. Somehow the financing fell through for that. Yet, it is something that again is the best of public policy, designed and created bottom up to meet the actual needs of these seniors who wanted to be able to live downtown close to supports and services. Somehow we do not have the flexibility to fund the kinds of things that clearly the market on its own has not been able to do.
In Alberta it was astounding to see what has happened after years of an ideology that thought the market would fix everything. I actually found a lack of housing even for those who are working. That is extraordinary. I met with healthy, strapping paraplegics who, because of a lack of supports and services, have had to sleep all night in their wheelchairs because there was no attendant care to get them to bed at night or to get them dressed in the morning. This is inexcusable in a country with our wealth. It is unbelievable that the downgrading of what was a long term care approach is now called assisted living. Seniors are now asked to pay for being fed, or clothed or helped into a wheelchair, or even charged to be wheeled down to the dining hall.
We need to provide supports and services for people with disabilities and for people who have given so much to our country and who are now senior citizens. How on earth can these people who have lived through the depression make a decision as to whether they can afford a bath this week or whether feeding is medically necessary? This was totally shocking to me and shocking to the very engaged seniors that I was able to meet with in both Calgary and in Edmonton.
The Kirby Centre in Calgary is probably one of the best examples of seniors coming together in the country. It started as a little kiosk. Seniors did not know what level of government to turn to. There is now a thousand people going through this centre daily, the first ever elder abuse hostel in Canada. This is a spectacular example.
However, when I talked to the people there, they know that so much more has to be done in terms of the role of government in people's lives. It is a positive role that must be there when the market chooses to build condos instead of affordable housing and when there is just not a sufficient ability to deliver supportive housing.
While I was in Edmonton I heard that the government had cancelled the national advisory committee on aging. This is extraordinary. It has been one of the most important pieces of social science research that goes on every year. It prepares our seniors report card and does studies on Alzheimer's. We know that we have to have evidence based policy. We have to have the ability to fund what works and stop funding what does not work. Without the kind of research that the national advisory committee on aging has done, we know again that we are at tremendous risk in terms of appointed committees saturated with ideology. We are going to make bad decisions that really are not in the interests of Canadians.
I was astounded also to hear from some of the seniors in Alberta who expressed their concern about not only affordable housing but also the status of poverty. Alberta has the greatest gap between the rich and the poor. Some 42% Calgarians are still living at the poverty line. This is appalling. Some have full time jobs and are living in shelters with a packsack and an alarm clock in order to go to work. This is just unacceptable in our fabulous country.
However, I was heartened when I went to Atlantic Canada and met with the people at Mount Saint Vincent and at WorkBridge and other wonderful places in Halifax West. They really did make me feel that we had a chance of moving to evidence based policy and looking at some of the real needs of seniors in our country in terms of what old age security actually means. There is no question about the fact that old age security, in the definition of the seniors of this country, means having a roof over their heads.
I was very pleased to see a tremendous project under way at Mount Saint Vincent with the seniors housing and support services survey, which I think is one of the best pieces of work that I have seen in a long time. This was being done under principal investigator Don Shiner. The survey asks the kinds of questions we need to ask. It is exactly what we will require as a country to go forward. I hope these excellent pieces of work like this one funded by SSHRC will be rolled out across the country.
I was also pleased to meet with the people there who are working so hard on the social economy and sustainability in the Atlantic node governance structure. These people are working on important things like empowerment, inclusion, policy analysis in mapping, food security, natural resources, measuring and financing the social economy, communication, and the way this kind of bottom-up understanding works. This is being done under the leadership of Dr. Leslie Brown. She, like so many of us, is astounded that the Conservative government took the $100 million that was destined for actually doing work on the social economy and exploring how seniors and persons with disabilities and many other Canadians could start contributing to the economy of this country and feel the full citizenship for which we hope for all seniors and persons with disabilities.
It was so amazing to see the kind of work on housing and what we learned at the subcommittee on persons with disabilities. The were terrific committee members, one being Wendy Lill. We heard about the kinds of things that we need to do in terms of having some lifelong housing standards across this country so certification for developers could be put on things that will be good for people's lives, such as having a 36 inch door so a wheelchair can get through, one accessible bathroom, one floor, and one bedroom. The idea is that there is a standard that exists, that people have agreed upon and that could be very easily rolled out as a national standard so that people would aspire in the development of the kinds of units that people could stay in for the rest of their lives and thus have supports and services come to them.
Since 1973, with the first “Beyond Shelter” report, we have known that we have so much room to work. No matter what we do with today's bill on making income security a bit easier, we know that people's disposable income still is only there once they have a roof over their head. This was described often and poignantly wherever I went across this country over the past couple of weeks. It is amazing to see the kind of spectacular leadership like that of Sean Wiltshire of the Avalon Employment agency in Newfoundland and Labrador and the amazing work being done, both on accountability and on disability-related supports, at the Coalition of Persons with Disabilities.
To go back to the conference in St. John's last Thursday, working groups identified principles that I think all of us ascribe to, that is, that there has to be dignity for Canadians and that we have to find a way to understand that this is almost measurable. Mary Anne Burke, at the Global Forum for Health Research in Geneva, is looking at bias-free frameworks that could deal with things like gender and ageism and whether persons with disabilities are treated with dignity in society. Are they afforded self-fulfilment? Is there a real outreach in terms of social inclusion and an understanding of their need for independence? Is there also an understanding of the need for safety and security? Above all, is the Canadian value system fair?
It was very interesting to see their priority directions in terms of, number one, recognition of older persons, their value and worth, their social inclusion, and the fight against ageism. Their number two priority direction was in celebrating diversity. It was about understanding a lifespan perspective, a language and a culture. It was about understanding the role of elders in regard to our aboriginal peoples, the role that geography plays, the role for persons with disabilities and in gender. It was about understanding that this diversity needs to be celebrated and adds to the richness of the tapestry of this country, but also it was the understanding that one size will not fit all and that again there needs to be the kind of flexibility that allows the diversity to be celebrated.
In policy direction number three, they talked about supportive communities. Again, whether that is Jane Jacobs talking about neighbourliness or Robert Putnam talking about social capital, we know that in communities we need to be looking after one another. To me, the number one example of that was how upset we were in 2000 that Canada had been rated only thirtieth in the WHO standings on health systems performance and in health outcomes. Yet France had been named number one.
Then, in 2003, we felt terrible about the 44 people who died with SARS and also about the 14,000 people who died in the heat wave in France. These people were mainly elder women in attic apartments without a system for health to actually bring them together. Since that time, France really has moved on how to build systems for health that have inclusion but also include the kind of safety and security needed for people in a time of emergency.
It means that we need to have learned from Eric Klinenberg's work on the heat wave in 1995, in his anatomy of a social disaster, wherein they mapped Chicago and saw that the rich people did well because they had air conditioning and the middle class did well because they had minivans and could go camping. The poor people died, except for the poor people in the Latino community who all knew one another and looked after one another. They even looked after the Polish seniors who had not yet moved out of that neighbourhood. That is what bottom-up and community based solutions mean. That is really the role of all levels of government coming together.
When we talk about a priority direction of supportive communities, it does mean that a lot of these solutions will be on the ground, but it also means that municipal and regional governments need the help of provincial and territorial governments and the federal government to make all of these happen together around transportation and housing, around working together in age-friendly communities, in literacy, education and communication, and in dealing appropriately with the unpaid caregivers.
It is interesting that in today's bill we are talking about financial security, but to these people that was the fourth priority direction. I think this speaks to the fact that we have done pretty well in terms of some of the financial security of most seniors, although we still have work to do. In terms of income, financial planning and gender differences, there is still a long way to go. Certainly the Money Matters program developed at the Kerby Centre, which actually helps the banking industry deal with the abuse of seniors, has been very important in terms of making sure that seniors keep the money they have.
It would be a whole different speech on health and well-being. At almost any meeting with seniors, three-quarters to fourth-fifths of the meeting will be on the issue of health and health care. I think we need to make sure from falls programs to making sure they get medication and end of life care. There are many things that are their security around these issues, but there are also dental care, vision care and all the things that we know we still need to work on. I hope that over this next little while their last priority, which was around employment, education and research, will go on in terms of how we train more people to be comfortable working with seniors, to be really good at it and to care.
Again, the conclusion was that of Cicero, who said that it is not old age that is at fault but our attitude toward it. I hope we know that we still have a great deal of work to do, even after today's bill.
