Bill No. 391 - Income Tax Act (amended) Respecting A Seniors Income Benefit - 2nd Reading
CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I'm pleased to rise and speak to Bill No. 391. Was that a good job? I don't know. The point of our bill is to say that it is complicated and difficult and insufficient to try to access the Seniors Care Grant for seniors. We're not saying it's bad; we're not saying it shouldn't exist. We're saying it's insufficient and it is complicated to access, and that's what we just heard about.
We heard about constituency assistants needing to go out into the community and find the seniors and fill out the forms and convince them that it's okay to fill out the forms. That is a waste of effort. We heard the Minister of Finance and Treasury Board today acknowledge that it is simpler for someone to receive an automatic benefit. He followed that up hurriedly, maybe on advice from some invisible person, to say, Oh, but sometimes there's fraud. I mean, we're talking about helping seniors afford the basics. I don't think that that is at the core of our concern here. This is income-tested.
I would say that the comments of the government on this bill only strengthen our position that we need to have a seniors income supplement like almost every other province in the country has. We have had huge growth in our province in the last few years, but we remain an older province, one of the oldest provinces in the country.
Census data shows that the proportion of the population age 65 and older in Nova Scotia was 22 per cent in 2021. For obvious demographic reasons - notwithstanding, I know, a slight decrease in the average age in our province - that number is going to continue to grow. We know that seniors in Nova Scotia are the most squeezed by the rising cost of living. They have, for the most part, a fixed income, and they can't, by definition with a fixed income absorb the rising costs of food and rent and gas and everything else.
Increasingly in my constituency, I hear from these seniors. We started to hear from them - actually, they were sort of the canary in the coal mine for us about the housing crisis and the need for renter protections in Dartmouth South for us. We've heard about it across the province and in other constituencies, but in my constituency, a few years ago I started hearing from seniors who, on the advice of their kids or their financial planner, had sold their family home and rented an apartment and done all the math and figured out how they were going to afford it all on their fixed income. Then all the prices started going up every year, and they didn't have anywhere to go.
That continues to be more and more of a problem. One in 10 seniors in Nova Scotia lives in poverty. This is the highest ratio among that age group in the country. The poverty rate, in fact, of people 65 and older is almost two-thirds higher in Nova Scotia than the national average. The most important point that I think we are trying to make - the member of Halifax Chebucto, myself, our caucus - is that every other province or territory, except for PEI, has a program to supplement seniors' incomes. It's not designed for specific expenses.
We are not trying to scare seniors away from applying, but to be honest, when there is a program that requires receipts, that's complicated to apply for, that people are worried, for whatever reason, as we heard from the government member just now, this is a downloading of useless work from the Public Service into our constituency offices.
Our constituency assistants should not be spending all their time chasing down people in the community to show them how to fill out forms and get their receipts. We should create a simpler process so that they don't need to do that. This is the perfect example. Seniors tend to have a harder time with technology. They tend, as was said, to be more financially conservative, so they might be concerned for all the reasons. There is a very simple solution to that: We have an automatic program. Then we have education about it, and we say, Here's how this program works; it would be good for you.
Most other provinces and territories have income eligibility requirements, and most would require that people already have to be recipients of OAC and GIS. Four provinces have standard amounts and the rest are on a sliding scale based on income. Many amount to a very significant supplement, particularly for the people who need it the most. In B.C., that's up to $99 a month. In Alberta, that's up to $3,600 a year. In Saskatchewan, it's up to $360 a month.
This isn't just like money falling from the sky. This is money that seniors who have worked their whole lives and retired need - importantly - for whatever they need it for, not for the minutiae of receipts that this time the government has decided it's eligible for. It might be for housing. It might be to feed their pet, who is their last loved one, whom they adore. It might be for food. It's not really our business. It's so they can live in dignity.
If it's a sliding income scale, then we understand, based on Statistics Canada and census information, Department of Finance and Treasury Board, whether or not they need that money. We know what a living wage is. We know what it costs to live. If someone is living below that threshold, particularly a senior, particularly someone who has worked their whole life, then we believe that it is the very least we could do to have an income supplement.
To the Seniors Care Grant, as I said at the beginning, we're not being negative about the Seniors Care Grant. It's good that we brought it in, but it's not enough, and it's too complicated. It can't be used for food or medication or rent. It can't be used for cellphones, eyeglasses, dentures, personal alerts, vitamin supplements. You have to spend the money up front and then wait for reimbursement. MLAs know what that's like. This is a situation that many seniors may or may not be able to do, or may just not do, to the point of the previous speaker.
They may be extremely conservative with their credit cards. The seniors in my life are. They're not going to put something on their credit card that they can't pay off when that bill comes in. Will they have the grant? I don't know. That may prohibit them from spending the money that they need to live because it can take up to eight weeks to get reimbursed.
We know that it has a history of low uptake, this program. The early numbers from the first few months - again, this was reflected in the government's own remarks, that it was difficult to get uptake on this program - show that only 18,600 of the roughly 64,000 people eligible actually had applied at that time and only $9 million of the program's $30-million budget had been spent.
What we propose is an automatic benefit. It would catch the seniors who need it and would make it simple for them.
I do want to, again, come back to housing for a moment. Part of the reason that this kind of supplement is so critically important is because the housing plan that was recently unexpectedly released - after it wasn't going to be released and then it was released - had almost nothing in it that is rent geared to income. This is the kind of housing that the seniors who would be eligible for this benefit would need. In order to have secure housing that they could count on - which so many seniors come to us and talk to us about not having - they would need to have housing that was affordable based on the amount of money that they have.
A single person receiving the maximum amount of the Guaranteed Income Supplement and OAS right now gets between $1,700 and $1,800 a month. According to Rentals.ca, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Halifax is over $1,800 a month right now. They don't get enough every month just to pay rent. This is why, increasingly, seniors are becoming homeless.
This is an urgent situation, and it's a situation that needs to be dealt with in a multi-faceted way. This isn't a silver bullet, but this is one way - one simple, I think, elegant way - that the government could follow the lead of their counterparts across the country and help seniors to weather this storm. In two months, the rent cap will go from 2 per cent to 5 per cent.
When we had a housing drop-in session a few months ago in my constituency - because we have become, in some ways, the hub of the homeless population in Dartmouth - we have The Bridge, modular housing, a tent site - we assumed that those would be the folks who would come. A few did, but over half were seniors. They were seniors who would not have identified themselves as living in poverty, although some of them may have been. They were seniors who, as I described at the beginning, had moved into an apartment, done their tidy income analysis, figured they could afford it, and suddenly they can't. They came and asked, What can we do?
The Minister of Service Nova Scotia likes to talk a lot about education, so we were trying to educate people about what they could do. Sadly, in many instances, the answer was nothing - that they couldn't do anything because their rent was going to go up, and it was going to go up legally. What we would like to say is, You can move into that affordable seniors' complex down the road. But not only can we not say that because it doesn't exist, it's not even contemplated to exist. It's not even in the housing plan. We're not even talking about it.
Having more units - number one, you can't use the Seniors Care Grant to pay for rent anyway. Having more units isn't going to magically bring down the cost of housing. We don't believe in trickle-down housing, unlike others in this Chamber.
What would help in the interim, as a band-aid, would be a steady flow of just the amount that we know seniors need to be able to approach living in dignity. This is what every other province except for ours has recognized, and this is what we're asking the government to do. It's not rocket science. It's not a pie in the sky. It's not a radical idea. We are telling this government that we are laggards in this regard, that we are failing our seniors. I'm not saying that's on purpose. I'm not being negative. I'm simply stating the fact that if we look across the country at the way that other provinces support their seniors, we come in last.
We know that everyone in this Chamber respects our seniors, supports our seniors, talks at length in here about all the ways in which we do, but as the government often likes to say - as the Premier likes to say - talk is cheap. We are a government of action.
Here's an action - and a few others that we think the government could take. They could waive seniors' Pharmacare fees. Then seniors would be able to afford their medication. They wouldn't have to choose between medication and food. They wouldn't end up in the emergency room - maybe in a waiting room, like we saw on the front page of the Chronicle Herald today. We could ban charging long-term care fees for people who are waiting in hospital for a long-term care bed, the alternative level of care patients. It's not their fault they can't get into long-term care. It's our fault because we haven't fixed the health care situation.
We could assist with the cost of hearing aids. We could make it illegal to evict low-income seniors into homelessness. We could create a seniors' advocate that can investigate and advocate for seniors' issues. These are some of the things specific to seniors, but there are lots of others. We could waive the grocery tax. We could raise income assistance rates. We could increase the Affordable Living Tax Credit. These are all things that our parents, our elders, the people who built our communities, who built this province, would benefit from. These are people who have so much to teach us about life, and who deserve to be taken care of after they have taken care of us.
Like Nova Scotians, New Democrats believe that as a society, we have the responsibility and every ability to take care of each other. We believe in dignity in old age. We know that the government can help deliver it, and we will keep fighting for it.