Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. We appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of our 70,000 supporters. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is the largest and oldest national not-for-profit, non-partisan taxpayers advocacy group.
We will be circulating our remarks, and we'll also be making reference to our “Zero in Two: Taxpayers Deficit Action Plan”, and the most recent issue of our “Taxpayers' Agenda, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation Top 20 Policy Priorities for the Harper Government”. You can get that at taxpayer.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
Mr. Chair, we want to salute the government's action in cutting 42 positions and $15 million in spending at the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency yesterday. That was a blow in favour of taxpayers. It was long overdue. The head count under the three minority parliaments with the Government of Canada went up by 39,000 people. You added 5,000 or 6,000 people to the roster of National Defence headquarters. You grew National Defence headquarters in the minority parliaments to a size greater than the Royal Canadian Navy. The “bloatation” in Ottawa is absolutely out of control, and we salute this first tiny step on the part of the Government of Canada to rein in its spending.
In 2007, the boom year, you had record revenues of $242 billion and you ran a $9 billion surplus. For the year just ended, you were $7 billion shy of your all-time record revenues and you ran a $33 billion deficit. You're calculating in this current fiscal year $14 billion in additional revenues and you're still talking about borrowing another $32 billion and indebting future generations of Canadians.
We salute your efforts to rein in spending. We salute your efforts to balance the budget. We all know that in an emergency you could balance the budget this year with effects that wouldn't flow too far from the boundaries of the national capital region, and we strongly urge you to get on with it.
We're here to support your pooled registered pension plan proposal. We think this is something that all new members of Parliament, elected in all future by-elections and general elections, should be enrolled in. If it's good enough for Canadians, it's good enough for you guys. The same is true with the Public Service of Canada. If you're proposing a new pooled retirement pension plan for all Canadians, for the four out of five Canadians who aren't government employees, then start enrolling your new hires in this wonderful program yourselves. Let's all be in the program together.
We recognize that it's going to be utterly impossible to get sitting MPs to go for this. If I had a deal where $5.50 were contributed by my employer for every dollar I contributed, there's no way you could get me to vote myself out of that. We also believe that there is no reason to panic public servants who have made life decisions based on the incredibly generous pension plan they have—which is running a $200 billion unfunded liability, according to the C.D. Howe Institute—after their lifetime of service to Canada, but we urge you to get it back on a sustainable, honest funding level with every new hire.
We've touched on a few other issues. We've touched on debt and deficits. We also urge you to have a look at payrolls. Since the end of the boom in 2007, it's become apparent to the people in Kitchener—the people at Maple Leaf Foods who got short notice of the end of their employment—that a federal government employee with 16 years of service will have one year's notice on full salary, and many of these people will never end up losing their jobs. There are two classes of humanity here: the people on the public service dime and everyone else who is paying for it. Unless that gets addressed in a serious way, there's going to be some serious blowback on all the people sitting around this table.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.