Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the NDP motion put forward by my colleague from Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. I will be sharing my time with the member for Elmwood—Transcona.
The motion is about the dignity of Canadians, of senior and retired Canadians. I am far from retirement, but I care a lot about the issues facing seniors.
I would like to share a story with the House.
Before I became an MP, I worked as a community legal workers in Halifax. I worked on different poverty law issues. I was approached by a group of seniors living in a retirement apartment building. They were tenants and they were having problems with their building. They came to me for legal help and legal support. I helped them organize. This group of seniors mobilized and collectively worked to solve the problems in the building.
A year later when they found out I was running in the 2008 election, they came to me and said to me that I had helped them when they needed help and I was the only one who stood up to help them. Therefore, they said that they were there to help me. They hit the streets. They went out in droves, knocking on doors, talking to their neighbours and they started working on my campaign.
It was interesting at my nomination meeting, a nomination where a young woman was seeking election, an entire section of the audience was filled with my friends who were in their scooters, their walkers and with their well-earned grey hair rooting for me. When I won the election, they came to me and said that they felt invisible to the government, that they felt the issues of seniors were not important issues. They wanted me to go to Ottawa to stand up for them. Therefore, I rise today to honour that commitment.
In my work on poverty, I have often seen people throw up their hands in defeat when they are working on poverty issues. They say that it is too big, that it is too complicated, that there is no solution and that it is too complex.
I always use our Canada pension plan, our old age security and our guaranteed income supplement pension scheme as an example that it can be done. We can solve the problem of poverty. We did it for seniors. We dramatically reduced the rates of poverty in the country.
Professor Lars Osberg is an economist at Dalhousie University. He wrote a paper entitled “Poverty among Senior Citizens: A Canadian Success Story”. The paper looks at the poverty rates among seniors before and after the pension scheme was introduced. As his title suggests, it is a true success story.
Professor Osberg writes that in 1947 Canada had a means tested old age pension plan. It was available for the absolute poorest in Canada. It worked out to about $30 a month. In today's dollars that was about $289 a month. In 1952 that was replaced by the OAS system, the old age security system. OAS was a universal payment of $40 a month. Now that would be worth about $274 according to Lars Osberg.
With income at this level, the result was widespread and acute poverty among Canadians over the age of 65. Canadians had to wait until 1967 for the introduction of the guaranteed income supplement and the Canada pension plan. As the system matured throughout the 1970s, poverty rates among senior citizens dropped dramatically. They plummeted. Rates of poverty were still high for certain groups, and I am thinking especially among senior single women, but by and large this system lifted Canadian seniors out of poverty. It was a remarkable achievement. It was an achievement for all Canadians. Unfortunately today that achievement is slipping away from us.
The motion confronts a critical issue faced by Canadians, and I am very proud to support it. My colleague from Hamilton East—Stoney Creek has been travelling the country, holding town hall meetings and community forums, where he invites seniors to come in, talk to him, tell him what issues are facing them and what are their concerns.
I had the wonderful opportunity to be with him at one of these town hall meetings in southwester Ontario. What I heard in southwestern Ontario is exactly what I hear in Halifax. Seniors who rely on CPP, OAS and GIS are struggling to survive. They are having to choose between putting food on their tables or keeping their homes heated. The cost of living goes up, but their pension benefits stay the same, so it comes down to nutritious food or medicine.
The motion mandates the government to work with provinces and territories to ensure the sustainability of Canadians' retirement income by bringing forward measures, like expanding and increasing CPP, OAS and GIS, to ensure that all Canadians can count on a dignified retirement. A dignified retirement is something all Canadians deserve.
It is time for the federal government to stop standing on the sidelines, allowing the retirement security of Canadians to be compromised. We want to see real action and leadership. Canadians want to see real action and leadership, Canadians like members of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, or CARP.
CARP has recently supported a portable, universal pension plan based on the CPP architecture for the nearly one in three Canadians without any retirement savings. There are many out there without these savings. CARP believes this plan should be funded by contributions from employers and employees. It also agrees that self-employed Canadians should be allowed to participate in this plan.
The Canadian Labour Congress is also calling for changes to these schemes. It is calling for a doubling of CPP and QPP to be phased in. One of the wonderful side benefits is that it will not just relieve poverty, but it will also help stimulate our economy. By increasing income supports for seniors through our public pension program, many pensioners, who are living on fixed incomes, would use that money immediately in their local economies. This would equate to a stimulus measure that would ensure more funds would be circulating in communities around Canada.
It would not take much. A $1 billion increase in OAS and GIS would virtually eliminate poverty among seniors in our country. This figure would likely be about $1 billion a year in order to maintain the benefit over time. To some people who are listening or who will be reading this at home, $1 billion may seem like a lot of money, but the 1% cut to the GST equalled $6 billion, so it is about government decisions. It is about choices.
It goes without saying that increasing old age security benefits would protect vulnerable Canadians, especially older women, who, as I mentioned, have been historically a group that have not benefited as robustly from our pension scheme. It would help protect vulnerable people like single, elderly women.
However, another group experiences poverty, despite our existing regime, and that is new Canadians. They face a double disadvantage in the Canadian pension system. Public pension acquisition is very problematic for immigrants because of residency requirements. A 2003 survey found that 26% of recent immigrant seniors were in the lowest income quintile, versus 15% of non-immigrant seniors.
Expanding and increasing our federal pension program could alleviate poverty among recent immigrant seniors and among single senior women. It is a big win for us.
I have only spoken to the first section of the motion. There are four other sections that make real changes to our pension system, including establishing a pension insurance program for workplace sponsored pension plans, ensuring that workers' pension funds go to the front of the line of creditors in the event of bankruptcy and ceasing the practice of awarding CPP managers performance-based bonuses. All these points are worth supporting.
In short, I am very proud to support my colleague's motion, and I am hopeful that my colleagues on both sides of the House will agree.
