Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my hon. colleague on his introduction to Bill C-54.
I too rise in support of Bill C-54 and I want to start by talking a little about some of the problems with how government in the past has managed pension programs in general. There are a lot of pension programs that exist in this country today.
We have to have a complete understanding. There really is not anything any more important than looking after our seniors today, for they cannot and will not get jobs as we are trying to get for our young people. They generally would not be retrained into our society. They are not going for extra education and these are the people really who deserve a secure retirement.
One of the members opposite is referring to himself. I think we will look after him too and I will talk a little about the MPs pension plan in a few minutes and we will see how well we will look after him in the future.
These are the people who really deserve a secure retirement because they have earned it through paying taxes and through paying into the CPP and so on. I guess we have to ask here whether the government and that other party from Jurassic Park have really looked after the welfare of senior citizens of the past. When we talk about changes to old age security, CPP and so on in the future we are going to have to get into looking at some new, constructive ideas because as most people in this country know money is becoming of short supply for those kinds of programs and they are going to have to be dealt with.
I have some difficulty in getting some confidence that this government will deal with these programs in a new, modern, constructive way. This is after all a traditional party of which we have one left in the House. Traditional ideas we thought were going to be gone in years past and for the future are ideas like the Senate. The better part of this country today is asking that we have elected senators, that they be effective and that we have equal representation in provinces. Yet this government still provides the patronage appointments to which most Canadians are opposed.
We talk time and time again about the MP pension plan. Virtually not a month goes by in this House when we do not complain about it. Yet no changes have been made. We are talking about tradition and how we get a government like this, a traditional party, to move ahead and make some constructive changes in CPP and old age security. We are running out of time on some of these programs and they really have to move ahead; laws and legislation like in the Young Offenders Act where the whole country really wants this traditional party here to move ahead with them and make tougher constructive changes. It has failed to do it time and time again.
What we have here I fear is another traditional party that is dealing with non-traditional problems like old age security and CPP which have to be changed.
Why would we expect this government to come up with new ideas? I guess maybe we do not and that is what we are here for. That is why we have come to this House, to try to infiltrate some changes throughout the system.
Old age security is what is called a non-contributory program. Individuals do not contribute to it. It comes from tax revenue. On one hand one might assume that we could cut that out because people had not contributed to it. That is not the fact. Over the years all the taxes paid into the government have been used in part to fund old age security which is good in measure. That will have to change somehow unless the government finds some revenue either by raising taxes, and we hope it does not do that, or cutting expenses and we know it is not doing that.
The Canada pension plan is the contributory portion of pension for Canadians where the employer and the employee contribute.
To address old age security and CPP and future changes we must look at how the government manages its current pension plans. We know what they are. They are the MP pension plan, the military pension plan, the civil service pension plan and the RCMP pension plan. There are a number of them. Those plans should be covered under the Pension Benefits Standards Act. This act sets standards for pension plans in this country on the financing and the fund management. It was introduced in 1967 and amended by the Conservatives in 1987. The plan has four very good standards which actually should apply to all pension plans.
The first one is that the employers must ensure that dollars are held in trust. This is very basic and necessary for any pension plan. A pension fund administrator shall be put in place managed by a board, an organization that is charge of the fund. The administrator must be responsible for appointing somebody for accountability and then the fund must be prudently invested. It
stands to reason that is the only way a good pension plan could be managed.
However, these standards that were in the standards act were intended to protect the interests of the plan members. Not surprising, however, Parliament exempted the federal government from these rules. Here we go with this kind of sanctimony. We will look after everybody else but ourselves. When this act came in and was modified in 1987, Parliament said that is okay for everybody else but we will not get involved in that portion, we will exempt ourselves from it. It did, with the military, civil service, RCMP and MP pension plans.
Consequently, there are problems with those plans. I am going to illustrate from these four plans what is wrong with the management and the ability to fund old age security and CPP.
The problem with that particular exemption is that total pension payments exceed the contributions. When you exempt yourself from these rules you start to go into the hole. You start into deficits. That we know is where we stand today. Today we have total liabilities for RCMP, military and civil service pension plans of $94 billion, unfunded. It is carried in an account on the books of the government as an SPA, I believe, a special purpose account. It is a liability. It is not funded in trust as the Pension Benefits Standards Act so directs everybody else to do.
We pay out about $6 billion to these three organizations, the military, civil service and RCMP. That comes directly from general revenues paid by the taxpayer.