Thank you. It is very good to be here and very good to be here with your Member of Parliament, Larry Bagnell, who, as you know, is a very determined and dedicated voice for your community.

You spend a day in Ottawa and you run into all kinds of people and, if Larry is one of them, by the end of the day somehow you get the impression that if the population of Canada is 30 million, half of that population lives in the Yukon.

It's a pleasure to be here to announce six new projects that are being funded through the New Horizons for Seniors Program for Yukon. I'd like to thank the Golden Age Society for hosting us today and to all of you from the various recipient organizations for coming here to take part in this special event. I would also like to thank the volunteers who sat on the review committee that made the recommendations for funding these organizations. Together they will receive over $50,000 in funding for projects that will support seniors and contribute to building stronger communities.

The New Horizons Program is a way to encourage seniors to be active in their communities. As we all know, the amount of time that we will spend as seniors is becoming an increasingly greater proportion of our lives. I very much look forward to seeing the results of these projects. As this is the first year of the New Horizons Program, we'll all have an opportunity to learn from these projects and all the others across the country and to discover new and innovative and even better ways to advance the inclusion of seniors.

New Horizons was launched last year with initial funding of $8 million for this fiscal year, and a commitment of $10 million annually thereafter. But the response was so overwhelming that in last month's federal budget this was increased by an additional $5 million for this coming year and $10 million the year after and $15 million in the year after that, bringing the annual budget to $25 million in subsequent years.

So it means that in this coming year, 2005-2006, the number of projects funded will at least double, and that many, many more Canadians will be able to take part in projects that include and empower seniors.

There were a few other things in the last budget that will affect seniors. One of them was the increase in the guaranteed income supplement, which was quite a significant investment by the government of $2.7 billion. As well, there was the announcement of the creation of a National Seniors Secretariat, and that's something that I very much look forward to working with.

One of the things that the Seniors Secretariat will focus on is looking at the life of a senior. I mentioned earlier, and as all of you know, we are living longer and we are living healthier. We will be living one quarter of our lives as seniors. One quarter is a long time, longer than we are as children. One quarter is something not to think about as a playing out of time but is a very significant amount and should be understood and dealt with in a significant way. And I think it is time to think about this.

We talk about quality of life, about quality of life in a health way, in an income-support way, but as all of you know, from day to day if your health is reasonably good—and most of the time through most of those years for most people it is—if your financial supports are sufficient to get you through the day, what is it that makes you feel one way or another?

Well, it has to do with the rest of that quality of life. What it is you're doing, what your new purposes are, what those things are that put a little spring in your step, that get you out of bed in the morning, that get you going in a particular direction.

And as all of you know better than anybody, it has to do with talented people with a lifetime of experiences, a lifetime of learning, a lifetime of being a part of a community, a lifetime of understanding and realizing how important that community is to them, a lifetime of building up the kind of gratitude that one has and the desire to help out.

New Horizons is a little piece of that, but the bigger piece is also that understanding of how fulfilling that last quarter of one's life can be. I think that all of this debate will be triggered by the bulge of baby boomers becoming seniors. That'll become part of what will focus this discussion, but it's an important discussion to have and something that I very much look forward to in the coming years.

When I played hockey my favourite place was the dressing room because the dressing room was just kind of that comfortable hang-around place, a place to go, a place where you needed to go but also a place you wanted to stay around because it felt good, because it felt right, and there's no replacement for a good hang-around place that feels just right.

Walk through these doors, you've got a hang-around place and just the way it's decorated, the way it's laid out, the comfort of it, the informality of it, it's that good, right hang-around place. And of course if you've got that hang-around place, it means you're going to go to it. If you go to it, then what happens next, who knows? You meet somebody you haven't met before, you talk about something you haven't talked about before, you get engaged in something that you would never have imagined yourself to get engaged in and all of a sudden things happen but they don't happen if you don't find that place to come together, to gather, that feels good, that makes you want to be there.

So I'm very pleased to be here to be part of this announcement and to have a chance to experience your hang-around place here.

Thank you.

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