Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am quite dismayed by this amendment. It's an open attack on a private member's bill that's attempting to do something about accountability.
Mr. Rathgeber came here in good faith. He's not asking for a sunshine list. He's not asking for the “gotcha” moment. We know the sunshine list, which was brought in by the Conservatives in Ontario. They were going to go after all those civil servants. Then it got bigger and bigger, and it's actually kind of meaningless.
However, the issue of salaries does have a certain level of importance in terms of access to information and accountability.
I certainly appreciate Mr. Rathgeber's concern here. There's not much that Conservatives and New Democrats agree on, other than the fact that we often don't really like each other. My grandmother was an old CCF, but my grandmother loved Diefenbaker. I'm not afraid to say that. There are elements where New Democrats and Conservatives sometimes come together, and one is on the issue of accountability. It's on the issue of being outsiders and coming to Ottawa and wanting to know that your tax dollars are being spent properly.
When they create a provision that would hide the salaries of people making $378,000 a year or $400,000 a year in the civil service, I ask what happened to that party of Preston Manning's. Where is the accountability here?
What we're seeing again in the Senate, the secrecy and the spending and the outrageous abuse of the public trust, and the fact that the public is not even allowed to find out what's happening with that money, is an affront to democracy.
I also find it appalling that we have a president of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement, who always seems to be beating up civil servants in the media. We have hard-working civil servants, people who do good jobs, and the public service is an important term. It's not to be denigrated because they are public servants. It's a very important institution and there are hard-working people throughout every aspect of the public service.
It seems odd that an amendment would be brought forward to actually undermine the spirit of the bill and to protect the upper mandarins.
Again, the DM 1 classification that Mr. Rathgeber had would begin at about the $180,000 mark. That's above what a member of Parliament makes. There are certainly people who would argue that you should set the standard at what an MP makes, or maybe what a senator makes. But at $180,000, that's the low end of where that goes. That actually goes up to people who are making about $280,000 a year with their bonuses.
If you asked most Canadians whether that should be accessible to the public, they'd say yes. What that's about, Mr. Chair, is that perhaps in some department something went wrong and someone failed in their duty, and the public interest was compromised, and someone wanted to know what was going on in that department. Then they found out that the person in charge of that was making $430,000 a year and was getting bonuses when the problems were going on. That's when you need that information.
The fact that they would move it up to the upper level of absolute protection, so that the bare minimum of people being protected are making $270,000.... The beginning base of the DM 4 is $272,000, where they start, but it goes up to $444,661.
My honourable colleague from the Liberals said he doubts anybody makes that. I would put to him that I doubt anybody will find out who makes that, because they're certainly concerned about protecting it. Why in God's name would they be worried about protecting salaries at $450,000 a year in the public service if there weren't perhaps many people making them?
This is not fair. It's not fair to the spirit of the bill, which is to have some levels of accountability. My colleague, again, I don't want to say Mr. Rathgeber did not set this up as a “gotcha” thing. This is about transparency and accountability to the taxpayer. I'm shocked that we now have a government that believes that keeping salaries at that high level...and it's not to say that people may not be deserving of those high salaries, but to keep them covered, to keep them from the public, is undermining all the principles of what that party once told Canadians.
We certainly think this amendment is wrong and has to be opposed.