Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
After reviewing Bill C-4 we were pleased to see some necessary changes made to labour relations and arbitration systems. We believe it's the right direction for the Canadian government to take at this time. Having said that, today we'd like to comment on income inequality, fairness in pensions, and keeping our seniors out of poverty, as we feel that these are issues the government needs to look at a little more carefully.
When we do talk about public sector compensation, it seems fashionable today to compare their compensation with the top 1% in our society. That is a completely false comparison. The richest in our society are rarely concerned about what the average public sector worker makes. Similarly, it wouldn't be fair to judge what a public sector worker makes by the poorest in our society, because it would be a complete imbalance.
What we are suggesting is that the committee focus on the average working Canadian when analyzing what compensation is equitable for a public sector worker. Since 2003 we've seen a significant increase in public sector compensation. According to the PBO, the average civil service employee now makes in excess of $77,000 per year. What makes that both alarming and unfair, in our opinion, is that the average private sector worker in the country today is making just in excess of $40,000. In other words, the private sector worker is making about 48% less than the public sector worker. I think in the previous panel one of your witnesses testified to that. He realized that the pay was so much spread apart between the public and private sectors.
At a time when inflationary trends are causing financial challenges for the average private sector worker, we do think it's very important for the government to fix this fiscal imbalance. I think there are some measures in this bill that certainly could do that.
The effect of rising salaries in the public sector has also had a very negative effect on pension programs. For every dollar that you give a civil servant in salary, the pension fund has to find $16 for that worker in retirement. When our pension system was created, the expectation was that an employee worked for about 30 years, would be retired for a few years, and then pass away. However, today our life expectancy is so much higher. A recent actuarial report that we have seen showed that the average life expectancy for a female public sector worker was 89.4 years and for a male it was 87.3.
Now, of course, we find ourselves two years into the baby boom retirement tsunami, and many of the pension plans are broken. It seems that the only answer to that has been to increase the contribution rates. That's not going to work. Over the last 10 years, in fact, we've seen contribution rates increase by over 130% into these pension funds, and now it is a fact that Canadians invest as much into public sector pension funds as they do into their own RRSPs. Again, this is unfair to the average private sector worker. As they struggle to pay the bills and have nothing left to contribute to their own pension fund, they have to match the contributions dollar for dollar of the public sector worker. According to the PBO, when you include pension matching and when you include some of the benefits, the average civil servant is costing taxpayers $114,000 per year. In fact, last year Canadians contributed over $34 billion into public sector pensions.
At Fair Pensions for All we believe that every Canadian should be able to save for retirement, not just the wealthy and not just those who are in government.
There's also been a lot of talk about the big CPP recently. We reject that out of hand. We ask you to do the same, because we see that as basically a backdoor bailout of public sector pensions and we would suggest you ignore that.