Chris Charlton

[Old Age Security Program, January 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I apologize for using the Prime Minister's name.

Nonetheless, the Liberals did give the Conservatives what the voters would not do, which is in essence a de facto majority government.

In a country that had a surplus of over $14 billion, that simply is not good enough. The income security of seniors must be at the top of the government's agenda, but it is not.

In fact, while we are debating an enhancement to income supports for seniors, the government is not even doing a particularly good job of getting seniors the benefits to which they are already entitled.

According to the government's own statistics, an estimated 130,000 Canadian seniors who are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement are not receiving it. Why? Because even if they are aware of the program, the application process is unduly complex, and many seniors lack the language or literacy skills to avail themselves of this benefit.

What has the government done about this? Instead of pursuing aggressive outreach programs to inform seniors of their entitlements, the Conservative government has re-designated positions at Service Canada so that experts, whose only role it once was to assist seniors to find their way through the maze of the CPP, the OAS and the GIS, have now been replaced by generalists who deal with everything from employment insurance to boat licences.

To add insult to injury, if they do not apply for their entitlements in a timely fashion, they can go back only so far in claiming retroactivity. A system designed like that is clearly not a system designed to help seniors retire with dignity and respect.

That is why I welcome the motion that the member from Rimouski has brought before this House today. In fact, it picks up on an item that was already part of the NDP's seniors charter, which I had the privilege of introducing in the House last year.

The seniors charter called on the government to guarantee for every senior in Canada the right to income security through protected pensions and indexed income support that provides a reasonable state of economic welfare. That charter, I am happy to say, was passed by members of this House by a vote of 231 to 52, including by the Conservative MPs in this chamber, I might add.

Only the BQ voted against it. Despite the fact that seniors from coast to coast to coast built this country, including seniors from Quebec, of course, the BQ abandoned the elderly in the province of Quebec simply for its own narrowly defined partisan purposes. Perhaps that is why the member from Rimouski has abandoned her former colleagues and now sits as an independent. She is finally free to advocate on behalf of seniors in her community.

In any event, as I said, her motion speaks to one of the sections that was part of the NDP seniors charter and so I am happy to support it here in principle. I say this on the understanding that the motion will be amended at the next debate and therefore will focus on the core section of the motion that I expect to survive after the amendment.

In essence, what the motion proposes to do is enhance the guaranteed income supplement for the very neediest of seniors and increase the income threshold for eligibility.

As members of this House will know, the guaranteed income supplement is one of the three major income support programs available to seniors through the federal government. It was developed to reduce poverty among seniors by providing a monthly income supplement for eligible seniors with low incomes.

However, as I said earlier, despite this program, there are still a quarter of a million seniors living in poverty. I am proud to support any motion that will assist this group of the most vulnerable in our community.

From my perspective, I think we in this House could and should have gone further. As it stands now, Motion No. 383 will enhance GIS benefits for only the very neediest in our community, yet from my perspective everyone who receives the GIS desperately needs more money.

While any increase is certainly welcome, what we really need is a comprehensive review of the entire income support system for seniors. Indeed, I have a motion on the order paper, Motion No. 128, which does precisely that. It calls for a review that looks ahead 10 years and ensures annually that seniors have an income that allows them to live with the dignity and respect they deserve. I am proud to say that this is the very first motion that I tabled in this House upon being elected.

It is precisely because I am keenly aware of the growing income needs of seniors that I am happy this motion is before us today. Certainly, as I said earlier in my comments, the many elderly women in my community of Hamilton Mountain who are living alone are experiencing poverty at much higher rates than any other segment of the senior population. Indeed, it is for every senior who is living on his or her own that I will stand in support of this motion.

I know that my time to speak tonight is short, so I would like to focus just briefly on the last part of the motion, which would make more seniors eligible for the GIS. Surely we can all agree that this is a laudable goal.

What section (d) of the motion does is raise the income threshold for GIS eligibility. It is a sad reality in Canada that many seniors cannot survive on their public income supports alone, so many are supplementing their income by participating in the workforce far beyond the normal retirement age.

I heard from a woman in Vancouver just two weeks ago who told me that her husband is in his eighties and still working because it is the only way that they can afford her prescription drugs. While that is a national disgrace and should be addressed through a national pharmacare program and adequate income support for seniors, it is a reality that is being lived daily by thousands of seniors across the country.

Income security is crucial to a retirement with dignity and respect. I say to all of the seniors watching our proceedings tonight that they should not let anyone tell them that it cannot be done.

[Old Age Security Program, January 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to participate in the debate tonight on the motion brought forward by the member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques on the old age security system. This motion is very timely.

This afternoon I tabled yet another petition in the House signed by hundreds more seniors, asking the government to pay them the money they were owed as a result of the StatsCan error in calculating the cost of living increase. Seniors were shortchanged on their public income supports because of this error. In calling on the government to reimburse them, they are simply asking for fairness. Yet the government is refusing to act.

If the government will not give seniors the benefits to which they are already entitled, I am not optimistic that it will contemplate enhancements to those benefits. However, I nonetheless believe that this is a critically important debate.

Unlike the parliamentary secretary, the Prime Minister cannot script me. Nor can he prevent me from speaking up on behalf of seniors. In fact, that is why I was elected to the House, to represent the views of the residents of Hamilton Mountain and to ensure that their concerns were being championed in the single most important democratic institution in this nation.

All politicians pay lip service to the fact that seniors built our country. They talk about needing to ensure that seniors can retire with dignity and respect and that they deserve that dignity and respect.

Let me tell the House what is happening to seniors, not just in my community, but across the whole country. With each passing year, it becomes more and more apparent that seniors are falling farther and farther behind. They have worked hard all their lives, they have played by the rules, but now everywhere they turn, every bill they open, they are paying more and getting less.

It is a fact that increases in the cost of living hits seniors disproportionately harder than any other segment of the population. When StatsCan determines the annual cost of living, upon which adjustments are based, its basket of goods includes things like plasma TVs, IPods, computers, all goods which are coming down in price and reducing the cost of living figures. Those also are not goods that poor seniors are buying. The items they are spending money on are essentials like heat, hydro, food and shelter, all of which have been going up and up.

In a series of polls that were conducted by the Canadian Labour Congress in 2004, 73% of Canadians polled said that they were worried about not having enough money to live after retirement, up by almost 20% from just two years before.

Canadians are worried about the solvency of their private pensions and the adequacy of both CPP and public income supports. Those fears are well-founded. Since the middle 1990s, the income of seniors has reached a ceiling and the gap between the revenues of seniors and those of other Canadians is now increasing.

According to the government's National Advisory Council on Aging, between 1997 and 2003 the mean income of seniors' households increased by $4,100, while the average income of other Canadian households increased by $9,000. The situation is even more pronounced for seniors living alone.

Private retirement savings are concentrated in a very small percentage of families. According to StatsCan, 25% of families hold 84% of these assets, while three out of ten families have no private pensions at all.

We find ourselves in a situation now where, across Canada, we have over a quarter of a million seniors living in poverty. That is hardly retirement with dignity and respect.

What is the government doing to address this issue? In fact, I would argue, precious little. We have now had two throne speeches, two budgets and one economic update from the government and none of them left seniors with anything about which to cheer.

We did not get universal drug coverage, no improvements to health care or long term care, no national housing strategy and no review of public income supports. The only people cheering were the Liberals who supported the Harper government's first throne speech and let the most recent mini-budget pass—

[Old Age Security Program, January 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate that this motion is before the House because there are few issues that are more pressing than the income needs of seniors, particularly the most vulnerable seniors in our communities.

I know that the member spoke very eloquently about the needs in particular of senior women in our communities. When they are living alone, they do experience much higher rates of poverty than any other segment of the senior population. I know that is true in Hamilton. I certainly know it is true in my riding of Hamilton Mountain, yet there is a section in the motion that I find kind of awkward.

When we talk about elderly, single, divorced and widowed individuals, that section to me gives the impression that we are advocating that government benefits, as essential as the GIS, are being allocated based on marital status.

I would like to think that the wording is as it is in that motion simply because that is how the actual legislation deals with people who are single and living alone, and that we are not actually supporting this distinction based on marital status. I just wonder whether the member could elaborate as to what her intent is and whether she is indeed just copying the language of the bill.

[Petitions, January 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have a second petition as well, which speaks to my campaign for seniors who were shortchanged by their government as a result of an error in calculating the rate of inflation. The government has acknowledged the mistake made by Statistics Canada but is refusing to take any remedial action. The petitioners call upon Parliament to take full responsibility for this error, which negatively impacted their incomes from 2001 to 2006, and to take the required steps to repay every Canadian who has been shortchanged by a government program because of the miscalculation of the CPI.

The petitions are signed by hundreds of people from British Columbia. The petitioners are all people who have worked hard all their lives, have played by the rules, and now are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. All the petitioners are asking for is a little bit of fairness from their government.

[Petitions, January 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to present a petition in the House today that was delivered to me at a press conference in Hamilton by 70 youths representing the Central West Youth Coalition. The CWYC is a partnership of young people working to prevent their peers from becoming addicted to tobacco products.

These youths have gathered over 6,000 names on their petition calling on the Canadian government to protect young people from tobacco industry exploitation by incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into Canadian law, including an appeal mechanism that would give young people an ability to monitor this law, and to encourage countries worldwide to follow Canada's lead.

In Hamilton, the campaign to stop the tobacco companies' aggressive marketing to youth was led by Chris Mooney of the Hamilton Crew for Action Against Tobacco. I am thrilled by the level of political engagement these youths are demonstrating. Although House rules prohibit me from endorsing this petition, I fully support their overall campaign.

[Settlement of International Investment Disputes Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, for me this has a bit of the same feel to it as the multilateral agreement on investment did under the former Liberal agreement. I have concerns about transparency and about accessibility for people to actually participate in the process.

However, I guess my most important concern focuses on accountability. As I look at all of this, the decisions issued through an ICSID arbitration are binding and there are limited grounds under which the process can be appealed. They are all very narrow reasons. They include: the tribunal was not properly constituted; it manifestly exceeded its powers; there was corruption on the tribunal; there was a breach in the rules of procedure; or, the award failed to state the reasons on which it was based. These grounds make absolutely no allowances for other substantive reasons for which a sovereign state might well decide, for the benefit of its citizens, to disagree with an arbitration decision.

I wonder if the member could elaborate a little more on why he feels comfortable, as a member on the government side, to do this to the Canadian public, to support a process that, as I said earlier, has no transparency, no accountability and no accessibility.

[Seniors, December 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is precisely because of this government that we have two million seniors living in poverty today and that number is growing.

Retired firefighters, police and municipal employees are all waiting for government action. Why? Because they all got dinged twice by this government: once when they lost out on CPP and OAS, and the second time when the cost of living on their employer pension was impacted by StatsCan as well.

The government can find billions of dollars for corporate tax cuts. Why can it not find the money to pay back seniors for a mistake that the government made?

[Seniors, December 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, a simple mistake by Statistics Canada resulted in a botched formula for inflation from 2001 to 2006. The consequence is that the Canada pension plan, old age security, and the guaranteed income supplement have been underpaid to every single senior in the country.

The minister who is supposed to represent seniors at the cabinet table admits the mistake but says, “too bad, so sad”.

Why is the government refusing to pay seniors what is rightfully theirs?

[The Environment, December 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, immoral, dishonest, misleading; surprisingly, those are not the words of committee members delving into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. They are the words of the international community as it condemns Canada's refusal to commit to deep emissions reductions to fight global warming.

This week marked the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto protocol. World leaders are gathered in Bali trying to negotiate a global agreement on the second post-Kyoto phase. Why? Because, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has pointed out, climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity in the 21st century.

However, under the stewardship of successive Liberal and Conservative governments, Canada's greenhouse gases are now almost 33% above Canada's Kyoto target. We should be with the leaders of the world, not the laggards.

It is an abdication of leadership to suggest that the world can only sign a climate deal if the U.S. does. Canadians expect the Prime Minister to act in our interest, not in the interest of George Bush.

While climate change has been rapid, it is devastating that Canada's response is not.

[Petitions, December 13th, 2007]

Finally, Mr. Speaker, as we find ourselves in another round of pre-budget consultations, I am pleased to present another petition on behalf of members and supporters of the building trades. This time the petitioners are from Sudbury and the Nickel Belt area in Ontario.

Building trades across the country have lobbied successive governments for over 30 years to achieve some basic fairness for their members. They want trades persons and indentured apprentices to be able to deduct travel and accommodation expenses from their taxable incomes, so that they can secure and maintain employment at construction sites that are more than 80 kilometres away from their homes.

It makes no sense for trades persons to be out of work in one area of the country while another region suffers from temporary skilled trade shortages, simply because the cost of travelling is too high.

To that end they have gathered hundreds of signatures in support of my private member's bill, Bill C-390, which would allow for precisely the kind of deductions that their members have been asking for.

I am pleased to table this petition on their behalf and share their disappointment that this item was not addressed in the government's mini-budget this fall.