Evidence of meeting #46 for Finance in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was subamendment.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Senior Director, Income Security, Department of Finance
The chief actuary does take into account and makes assumptions on projected asset growth and investment income that would be earned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, reflecting both on a real return rate of assumption.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
The question I have is, do the calculations get harder to make and harder to evaluate when...? Maybe the question should be restricted to whether they get harder to review when the assets are not liquid in the sense that there's not an actual market for them.
Senior Director, Income Security, Department of Finance
That would be a question for the office of the chief actuary or for CPPIB itself, which [Inaudible—Editor] on that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Karina Gould
We're not actually discussing the makeup of the Canada pension plan at this point. The subamendment is about providing reporting on inflation. Could you just stick to that and, again, what Mr. Stuart is able to answer?
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Okay.
Maybe the best thing for me to do, then, is.... It sounds as though the questions that I have as a parliamentarian are not able to be answered in this setting in the finance committee, and that's okay. It actually leads me back to the amendment and the subamendment.
For the people who are watching at home, the reason we are proposing this amendment and subamendment, and the reason we'd like to have a report prepared that includes the things that we're talking about in the subamendment so that report can come to Parliament, is precisely so that we can ask the kinds of questions that I've been asking today.
There are questions.... When I go back into my community and talk to people in my community, particularly in the environment that we are in right now, particularly when I talk to people at home who are concerned about their future and concerned about whether or not the CPPIB—CPP—can help them afford a retirement in which they can continue to live, and not even in the style they're accustomed to anymore—I think people are no longer focused on that—but in many cases, just not in their cars.
On what they want to know, there's an increasing interest in how these things work. I get asked more and more mechanical questions about how CPP works. People want to know things like, “With the amount of money that I paid in, why can't I get that amount of money out?” There are a lot of technical questions asked.
What this amendment—particularly the subamendment—does is require information to come to Parliament, where we can ask the kinds of questions that I've been asking this morning. With apologies to the officials that come here—I know they're doing their best to provide us with information—as the chair has quite rightly pointed out, they have limits in terms of the information they can provide and are often limited to the very specific subject matters and technical areas of expertise they have within their departments.
This is the beauty of being able to ask questions of members of Parliament, ministers and parliamentary secretaries. Once we get into the House of Commons, one of the amazing things about the institution is that those limitations fall away. Members of the House are required to answer the questions that we ask in the chamber. If they don't answer those questions, they don't have.... I recognize that it's not a luxury, because I know that you would love to answer all of these questions and that you have the expertise to do it, but they don't have the restrictions—that's the word I'm looking for—that we have in these committees.
To me, this really reinforces the reason we're asking for the amendment and the subamendment. I would like the opportunity to ask the minister the kinds of questions that I'm asking today. I think it is important to know how we get from the numbers that are in a report in any given year to more.... It's not that they're more realistic numbers, but they're longer-term numbers that relate to different points in time and allow us to really evaluate the health of the plan and the ability of parliamentarians or the plan.... It's really the ability of the plan to be able to withstand the kinds of adjustments we make to it when we change those contribution rates, whether we change them up or down, because while it's true that we've never lowered them before this, it doesn't mean that won't happen in the future. I mean, the government clearly was taking more money from Canadians than it should have been, which is why we're lowering the rates.
What I'd like to see and to understand is not just how the nominal to inflationary works for some of the more liquid assets. As we know, the Canada pension plan has liquid assets in the terms of regular stocks and bonds, and it also has things that get traded on secondary markets, which means that sometimes they're easy to buy and sometimes they're harder to buy, depending on what's going on. The Canada pension plan also holds all kinds of illiquid assets that it has to evaluate.
I'm going to stop there, Madam Chair, because I think I've made the point that I want to make. It's that when we're in committees like this and are restricted to all kinds of technical points, sometimes that whole picture doesn't come through.
With the report that we are proposing and the subamendments that show some of the things that we'd like in that report, I really hope that my Liberal colleagues would also be as curious as we are about how the CPP works and how those things translate into things that ordinary Canadians and I, as an ordinary Canadian, care about, so that we can get better information and make sure our government is serving us all.
Thank you very much for that.
Liberal
Conservative
Pat Kelly Conservative Calgary Crowfoot, AB
Madam Chair, it's 11 minutes after two o'clock. The normal practice of the committee would be to break for and suspend for question period. I note that we did not yesterday, which is not unprecedented but is extraordinarily unusual. I think it's been many years since that's happened.
I just thought I would ask—so that members can manage the rest of their day—whether or not you will now suspend for question period.
Liberal
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
Thank you.
At this point, if we are ever going to convince the Liberals, we have already exhausted that point, I believe.
I mean this with all sincerity to you and your colleague Mr. Countryman: Thank you very much. This is probably a bit longer of a discussion than you anticipated. I really do appreciate your sticking with us and providing the answers to the best of your ability, sir. Please extend it to Mr. Countryman as well.
At this point, I would say, let's call the question.
Conservative
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Karina Gould
It's been so long since I've been able to ask for a vote.
Shall subamendment seven to CPC-13 carry?
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Karina Gould
We'll do a recorded vote.
(Subamendment negatived: nays 6; yeas 4 [See Minutes of Proceedings])
I would just like the record to show that there's still a great deal of collegiality on this committee, 20 hours in. I thank members for that.
Mr. Kelly, you have the floor on CPC-13.
Conservative
Pat Kelly Conservative Calgary Crowfoot, AB
Thank you.
I will go back to the main amendment. I have already signalled that I support this amendment. I certainly do hope that other members will support it. I think it is prudent to have this level of reporting and accountability. We have had many objections raised by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance to all of the additional transparency and good data management proposals that we have made to this bill.
Conservatives are here to improve this legislation. We have many issues with a number of things in Bill C-30. This is, of course, the spring economic statement's implementation act. It is something that we do not support, because we don't support the government's entire approach to budgeting. I think our concerns with that have been vindicated by so many reports that keep coming out.
We're doing our best with a bill that has a lot of problems, but we're dedicated to making this a better bill by proposing reasonable amendments that one would hope the members of the government could support. This is including this one, which would trigger a reporting mechanism that would be helpful for Canadians and helpful for policy-makers. If we can't undo the inflationary spending, the deficits, the botched deficit projections that were contained in this economic statement.... The projections of the finance minister were, in fact, debunked by the Parliamentary Budget Officer last week. If we can't undo all of these things, then we owe it to ourselves to at least try to be positive in whatever way we can by increasing the accountability measures that this government would be forced to undertake as a result of the amendments we're proposing.
This one is a reasonable one. It is to do with the Canada pension plan, and it amends that act so that Canadians will have better information about a program that is so important to the long-term financial plans of Canadians. It's for Canadians of all ages, including young Canadians who are beginning their own lives as independent adults or maybe even not independent yet, given the high cost of living. It's hard to get young people to really focus on retirement, but it is when Canadians are young that it's most important. The long-term effect of compounding interest and of return over time is so critical. The decisions that young Canadians make now have such a real impact on how they will live out the later years of their lives. The Canada pension plan is an important part of that.
Some planners call it one leg of a three-legged stool. It goes with employer retirement benefits and private savings. Employer pension plans are increasingly rare, so Canadians are increasingly looking at having to save for their own retirements, which is extraordinarily difficult to do when housing for most Canadians—young Canadians, especially—chews up almost all of their income. This goes along with the other high costs they face, like the cost of groceries, the cost of fuel and all of the living expenses that have spiralled up and out of control for so many young Canadians. The Canada pension plan is just that much more important to the long-term financial health of young Canadians, whether they know it or not and whether they appreciate it or not at their young age.
I have three “young adult” children. I'm in contact with lots of young people and know what they're going through as they start out their adult lives and are beginning to leave school or maybe completing their education. It is important that Canadians, young and old, who are already reliant on the system, and those who may find themselves reliant on the system or are likely to be reliant on the system in the decades ahead have accurate and timely reports and reports that they can understand and make use of.
This is why we're here. We're trying to help the government by using the tools available to parliamentarians, because it's parliamentarians who pass laws. The government doesn't make laws. It introduces them. It's up to us, as parliamentarians, to examine them and make prudent legislative decisions. The Prime Minister, in fact, even recently.... He seems to think he is the CEO of Canada, as opposed to the leader of a Parliamentary caucus and the leader of a government. Perhaps he needs some help with his civics so he can know that it's Parliament that makes laws.
We are going to do the best we can at this committee in order to help make a better law for Canadians. To that end, I have another helpful suggestion: the possibility of making this amendment more palatable to the government, which has signalled its intention to oppose CPC-13.
Liberal
