44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am very disheartened to see that the Liberals are continually trying to avoid parliamentary process. The Conservatives brought a reasoned amendment that said we recognized this was an important issue, and we would be willing to amend it at committee. I have been calling for a resolution since March of 2021.
The government knows the bank accounts of the people who got GIS and the bank accounts of the people who got CERB. It can certainly put the money in the accounts and reconcile it later, as it has done for 800,000 people who received benefits illegally and for people who lived in foreign countries who received benefits. It is ridiculous that when it is not going to be paid out until June of 2022, the government would be forcing Parliament to avoid due process once again.
Can the minister tell me why?
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Mr. Speaker, seniors 75 and older are supposed to be getting an increase to their old age security, and of course there was the pre-election lump sum that was encouraging them to vote a certain way.
There are seniors who wanted to top up their incomes with part-time jobs, but when they applied for CERB, they could not apply for a partial CERB, so they got the whole $500, and some of those people took money out of RSPs to pay the taxman, who wanted all the CERB back.
Would the people who already paid the CERB money back be reimbursed? Are they going to continually be behind the eight ball because, having taken money out of their RSPs, that again props up their income so that they qualify for less of the supplement?
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Mr. Speaker, of course, I would advise any senior or individual here in Canada to seek financial advice on how they manage their affairs. With Bill C-12, we want to ensure that for the literally hundreds of thousands of seniors who may have been affected by any sort of clawback on their GIS, the income they received from CERB and other benefits is not included in their taxable income for determination of benefits going forward.
For an individual in Canada, it is correct that if they pull money out of their RRSP, it is taxable income and they would pay taxes on it. When we make an RRSP contribution, we receive a nice deduction for it, and I encourage Canadians to make an RRSP contribution if they have the ability to do so.
All individual cases should be looked at by the member and should be brought to the attention of the minister and the parliamentary secretary.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member for his speech, even if it seemed as though he was giving an abridged version of the speaking points from the last election campaign.
The government has known since May 2021 that seniors collecting CERB have been receiving reduced guaranteed income supplement payments, and seniors have said that it has been catastrophic for them.
If the government has done so much good for seniors, why did it not anticipate this problem and take immediate action to remedy it?
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Mr. Speaker, in all of Hamilton, 2,020 seniors saw a reduction in their GIS benefits because of the CERB clawbacks. Residents in Hamilton Centre bore the brunt, with almost 660 having their GIS clawed back. This has been an attack, and it has been devastating on working poor seniors in my community.
In a time of such uncertainty and despair, that the Liberals would plunge seniors further into poverty can only be described as cruel and unusual. They have known about this for quite some time. I ask the hon. member, who knew this was an issue for seniors, why he and the Liberals waited so long to fix it.
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- Feb/15/22 4:15:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in a former life, I was the chief of staff to a minister. Every time we were asked to tighten the budget, IT infrastructure was cut because it has less of an impact in the short term.
I do not know if that is why all infrastructure has been neglected. I have noticed this with EI sickness benefits and immigration. I know it is complicated, and I am not saying otherwise.
However, I cannot understand how CERB cheques were issued within ten days because it was urgent, but we are unable to issue cheques for seniors who are currently in such great need and who have been experiencing stress and anxiety since July 2021. I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that the government of a rich country cannot quickly issue a cheque to help the most vulnerable seniors in Quebec and Canada.
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Madam Speaker, if I understood correctly, earlier, our Liberal colleague chastised the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives for voting against the motion.
We are not against the motion. What we were against was closure. I think my colleague explained it well. Bloc Québécois members sent letters to the Minister of Seniors before the election because we saw this coming. As of July 2021, seniors's GIS was reduced. These are the most vulnerable seniors, those who need the money the most, and they have not been reimbursed yet.
The Liberals themselves created this emergency. Seniors should be reimbursed as soon as possible, and the law needs to say that CERB is no longer part of the GIS calculation.
What are my colleague's thoughts on that?
I think it is deplorable that the Liberals are giving us a hard time for saying no to closure when they are the ones who caused the problem.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague down the way for asking the right questions. Why are we doing this tonight? Why are we having this debate when we know what the right thing to do is? It is to support our seniors as quickly as possible.
How did we get here? When we think of the CERB being put into place, it is because of the tools we had as a federal government through employment insurance. Some of the characteristics of the employment insurance programs, such as income testing, found their way into the program that we delivered at rapid, lightning speed through our departments, and now we are doing the right thing. That test did not work for seniors who were supplementing income, so we have to do the right thing by seniors.
I agree with the hon. member that we should be getting to the vote now. We should not be delaying this on behalf of our seniors.
Could the hon. member reflect on how quickly we did what we did using the tools we had through employment insurance to create a new program? Now we are pulling that back since it was not exactly employment insurance, but the CERB emergency response we did.
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Madam Speaker, I do not want to disappoint my dear colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue who is sharing his time with me, but my son is putting my husband to sleep with some lullabies. He will not be joining us.
The Bloc Québécois has always supported targeted assistance programs that respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that the Liberal government failed to be proactive. We voted for Bill C-2, which was hastily passed in the fall, in order to quickly help the groups most affected by this pandemic. One of our conditions for supporting that bill was that Ottawa stop penalizing working seniors who receive the guaranteed income supplement, or GIS, by treating the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB, as employment income for the purpose of calculating the GIS.
At the parliamentary committee, the Minister of Finance even admitted that this was a significant problem, but, like senior officials of the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA, she stated that it was a complex issue that would be difficult to resolve because of the computer system. She nonetheless made a commitment to resolve it.
Here we are today with a bill that would finally correct this injustice being inflicted on our seniors, but that is still disappointing on several counts.
First of all, this bill will ensure that GIS recipients will not be penalized as of July 2022. This may sound good at first glance, but this substantial reduction of their cheques has been going on since July 1, 2021. These seniors have been watching their finances worsen since last summer. Our party made several proposals to the government, urging it to act quickly to ensure that the recipients affected can obtain relief as quickly as possible—as of March 2022, as my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue hammered home. The government said that this was not possible for technical reasons, more specifically because of computer issues at the CRA. These so-called “computer issues” are pretty surprising for a G7 country.
Furthermore, Bill C‑12 does not include the retroactive one-time payment that the government promised in the December 2021 economic statement as compensation for the reductions that have already been made. We unfortunately do not have details on how the payment will be calculated, but we hope that it will be paid automatically and that the seniors affected will not have to do anything at all. One thing is for sure, seniors have had to wait far too long for this compensation and for their full benefits to be restored. The government only made the announcement on December 17, 2021, in a news release that stated the following:
The CERB and the CRB were designed to provide financial support to employed and self-employed Canadians directly affected by COVID-19. The Government of Canada recognizes that some GIS and Allowance recipients are now facing lower benefit payments this year because of the income they received from these pandemic benefits.
It took the government several months, way too long, to admit there had been a mistake, and now it is taking way too long to act. It is deeply disrespectful to these senior workers who have been impacted by this problem since July. The problem is affecting their financial resources and their ability to buy essentials.
What is really disappointing is that the government is once again attacking a deeply vulnerable population. Everyone knew CERB was taxable income, but when people's income is low enough to qualify for GIS, they do not pay much tax. For GIS beneficiaries who collected CERB, the problem is a simple one. For every CERB dollar they got, the federal government would claw back 50 cents from their GIS. That amounts to a federal tax rate of 50%. We can all agree that is too high.
It is important to note that no one in the federal government informed GIS recipients that their CERB income would literally melt away their GIS benefits. The Bloc Québécois sees this as a major injustice that constitutes prejudicial and appalling treatment. The FADOQ network described the situation as a tragedy. Compensation is urgently needed. The government has known this for a long time, but has not acted accordingly.
Need I remind members of the huge inflationary surge that occurred in 2021? The inflation rate in December was 4.8%, the highest it has been in over 35 years. Prices went up even more for many essential goods. Grocery prices rose by 5.7% year over year, the largest increase in a decade, while housing prices rose by 9.3% relative to December 2020.
It is the most vulnerable, especially people living on fixed incomes, such as seniors, who feel the greatest impact. It is outrageous that the government is doing this to our seniors.
Another big disappointment is that Bill C-12 will not end the inequity between GIS recipients who applied for CERB through the CRA and those who applied at Service Canada. It is important to remember that CERB was administered by the Canada Revenue Agency and Service Canada.
In certain circumstances, when pension income is reduced from one year to the next, claimants may request that their benefits be recalculated on the basis of an estimate of their income for the current calendar year. This is known as the “GIS option”.
We have criticized the fact the “GIS option” is available only to claimants who received CERB through Service Canada, not those who received it through the Canada Revenue Agency.
Indeed, only CERB benefits issued by Service Canada have been legally constituted as EI and are eligible for a “GIS option” review. CERB should be treated the same for all GIS calculating purposes, whether it was issued by Service Canada or the Canada Revenue Agency.
Pandemic-related assistance programs were brought in quickly. However, by the summer of 2021, in other words 15 months after the pandemic began, there were no more excuses for the government to keep reproducing this inconsistency to the detriment of seniors. The government should have used the bill to correct this gap, but clearly it missed the boat yet again.
In conclusion, the COVID‑19 pandemic has affected a lot of people and businesses since the beginning of 2020, but that is nothing compared to the consequences it has had on the senior population with respect to both their physical and mental health, as well as their financial health.
The government is offering a solution that can be described as too little, too late. Once again, that shows that the government is MIA when it is time to help seniors. I would remind the House that this is the same government that chose to create two classes of seniors by increasing OAS only for those 75 and up.
Let us not forget that financial insecurity does not wait for a person to turn 75 to strike. To fix the problem, the Bloc Québécois has proposed that the OAS be increased by $110 a month for all seniors 65 and up. What do the Liberals propose?
They propose a one‑time, non-recurring cheque for $500 for seniors who will be 75 or older as of June 2022. Pre-election smoke and mirrors: such is the Liberal way of governing. With that decision, the Liberals are sending a very negative message to the 970,000 pensioners in Quebec aged 65 to 74, telling them that they do not matter.
In my opinion, Bill C-12, as presented and without the changes proposed by the Bloc Québécois, demonstrates that the government is ignoring the most vulnerable seniors, and that is deeply disappointing. When we watch what this Liberal government is doing, we have the impression that it is downplaying the problem and expecting it to fix itself, which seems to be the norm recently.
We have before us a bill that does seek to fix a problematic situation, but it is flawed. We expected better from the government, after it took so long to address such a serious situation. The people who spent their lives building the society in which we live today deserve more respect from the federal government. The Bloc Québécois will always be there to stand up for seniors.
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Madam Speaker, there are two issues here.
First, we need to correct the situation that Bill C‑12 seeks to address, which is that CERB was not factored into the calculation of the guaranteed income supplement. This is not the only problem that seniors have faced, of course, but the bill must be approved relatively quickly because the government has already waited too long to fix this situation.
That said, I completely agree with my colleague that seniors are facing undue hardship, especially in terms of the lack of affordable housing and the ability to afford basic necessities. This must absolutely be addressed, and the House will be happy to discuss these issues in due course.
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Madam Speaker, I know my committee colleague from the NDP has risen several times in the House to advocate specifically on the legislative change that we are seeing. I want to pick up on the point of timing and she raises a very good point. We started to hear a lot of confusion when CERB was rolled out about the impacts it would have in July in that renewal period. Those with busy constituency offices would know that, but again, it has been several months since this has been highlighted and we are finally getting a change.
I wonder if the member could speak about the process and the frustration that I have heard in that it has taken so long to get to this point and the fact that we are here at 10:45 eastern time debating the bill as quickly as we possibly can with a timeline against us. Could she speak about the frustrations and the lack of timeliness to get seniors this change and the impact that they face? Yes, they will get an arrears payment, but the credit card debt, the line of credit, the IOUs with landlords and other bills have been significant. I would welcome her comments on that.
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Madam Speaker, in hindsight, I think we all feel like we can learn from the past. All we can do is use that new knowledge to do what we can to make a difference now so that we can make sure that mistakes like these do not keep going on in the future. I have been listening to the debate and really appreciate that we need urgency on this matter.
Hopefully, in the rollout the CERB will be communicated better. As I mentioned, much of the rollout was all in English, which is quite unacceptable in Nunavut. I am really hoping that improvements will be made for this rollout so that all first nations, Métis and Inuit who prefer to communicate in their indigenous language are able to receive it in their language, as well as, of course, the French language, which, as we know, is a strong language in Canada.
Qujannamiik.
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Madam Speaker, the member so clearly laid out the structural challenges that the federal government has created and that Nunavummiut face. Every time I hear her speak in this chamber, I am always struck by what a strong and powerful advocate she is for her territory.
In my riding there are seniors who have lost access to provincial benefits because of the GIS clawback. For example, the rental assistance program SAFER requires recipients to be on GIS. However, the impact of CERB repayment requirements on people who are on income assistance have an even more dire impact because of the government's miscommunication on CERB.
Could the member speak a bit more about the difference it would make for Nunavummiut seniors and elders to have amnesty when it comes to CERB repayments?
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