Mr. Chairman, a few members have spoken, so perhaps I could respond to some of the concerns that they have raised.
The hon. member from Manitoba who spoke some while ago, talked extensively of this business of equal pay for equal work. It goes a lot further than that. It also goes to equal pay for work of equal value. My colleagues on this side of the House believe in both those propositions, not just the first.
However, opting not to take a benefit personally does not constitute unequal treatment under the law. Everyone knows that. Opting to give one's personal funds to a charity does not mean that someone becomes disadvantaged under the law, because one has voluntarily given up that money. The hon. member asked “When did I ever become a charity?” That is an excellent question.
For example, if one opted then to give money back to the public treasury, which certainly one has the opportunity of doing, does not mean that person has suffered mistreatment by the government as a result of that.
That is not an appropriate proposition. The member is really mixing up propositions. Accepting or not accepting a benefit does not constitute inequity.
I refer to the fact that the bill is structured in essentially the same way as the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act, the amendments thereto, which were designed after the 1993 election at the request of members of the House. Not to put too fine a point on it, the members who made that request were not sitting on this side of the House. It was structured in the same way. There was an opting in provision where everyone was deemed to have been opted out and one had to opt in in order to be part of the pension. It is exactly the same principle.
Second, on the Public Service Superannuation Act, the hon. member said it is not the same because one would get the benefit another way. No, it is not so. A person would get their own contributions another way but not the employer's contributions. The employer's contributions are provided by virtue of adhering to the package. One does not get all the benefits another way by not participating in that. Of course I also gave other examples, such as the Canadian Forces Superannuation Act, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superannuation Act and so on. I am sure there are several others as well.
The hon. member for Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys said that there had been no salary increase over the last six years. That is not what I said, with respect. I said that the salary increase for members of parliament over the last 11 years had been a total of 6%. That is where the number six came in, not that there had been no increase over the last six years.
How did the salary get to be this way? Perhaps we should take a minute and discuss that so members will understand why the salary structure got off kilter the way it did. I do not think there is any doubt that it did, otherwise members would not see a situation like we have now, where I as a minister am not only paid much less than my own deputy minister but an assistant deputy minister has now caught up with a minister. It has become that off kilter over the years. I am talking about public servants and not about people in the private sector, to use the example raised by the member for Saskatoon—Humboldt.
It got that way because of two reasons. First, there were two freezes, one of them around 1985 or so and the second one in the late eighties. That combination meant that the salary was frozen for something like six out of eight years.
Second, when the legislation was designed in the late seventies there was a rather curious clause in it, which said that every year there would be a cost of living adjustment minus 1%. Therefore, in years where there was no government imposed freeze, members got an increase in the cost of living minus 1%.
Members had the combination of those two factors acting one in tandem with the other, which caused what we have now. For example, if the inflation rate was 10%, a member got back 9% and recovered 90% of the inflation. When there was an inflation rate of 2% and there was a recovery of 1%, members lost 50% of the inflation.
All of these things have occurred progressively. Many of them occurred even before I came here. Heaven knows I have been here a long time, but some of them even predate my arrival, namely, the structure and how members got to the cost of living formula that we have there. That is how it got so off kilter over so many years and I do not think anyone would deny that it is.