Madam Speaker, after years of abusing the trust of the taxpayer with a pension plan only King Midas could have matched, we have a private member's bill from a Conservative MP.
Although I favour the two issues that are addressed in this private member's bill, as has already been mentioned there are some flaws in it. The best way to evaluate whether the bill is successful is to compare the Liberal approach, the Reform approach and the approach of the private member's bill. I leave it to you, my colleagues, and those watching today to decide which approach is best.
Before I begin this comparison I would like to look briefly at who seriously advocated pension reform in Canada in the past and why all of a sudden here we are in 1994 looking at a very small private member's bill.
To date no action has been taken by the Liberals other than after the recent election five Liberal MPs have been added to the long list of those collecting pensions. The Conservatives have taken no action to date either but if you look at the last election again there were 111 members of Parliament picking up a pension. Then we have the Conservative's private member's bill today. The Reform Party has had a policy in place for a number of years which I will describe a little later.
Let us look at the approach to MPs' pensions that has been taken by the major parties. I would like to go through the government first, the Liberal Party. As I said, five Liberal MPs have recently been put on to this pension plan and are now safely living on government pensions for the rest of their lives along with many other colleagues. In fact there are 397 individuals today on MPs' pensions.
The pensions range from about $28,000 to $84,000. The infamous red book suggests that the Liberals believe reform is necessary. I am not sure whether they are speaking about our party or the reform of the pension plan, probably a little bit of both. They suggest the pension regime of members of Parliament has been the focus of considerable controversy and is now the subject of an independent review which was mentioned here just briefly. The book also talks about the end to double dipping which this private member's bill actually does address. After all these years of milking the system the Liberal Party is now suggesting that it believes that reform of the pension plan is necessary.
The Liberal Party has recently paid for a study on parliamentarians' compensation although it has suggested that the Conservative Party implemented this study and it could do nothing about it. That was incorrect.
The original study was around $150,000. It could have been stopped once the election was over but it was not. Now the cost of this report is approximately $200,000-plus and the commission which was just talked about will cost about $300,000. The report contained some recommendations.
It is important to note that the report stated that MPs actually should get a 37 per cent pay increase. Liberals say it is not going to happen because we have deferred that for two years but it is in there.
The study suggests that MPs should get severance pay and that Senators should get an increase in pay. It also suggests a number of changes to the pension plan. One in particular suggests that the pension plan should be indexed annually to the excess of inflation over 3 per cent which is actually one of the most expensive parts of the pension plan.
This study is going to a commission. Where it goes from there we do not know but I suspect that we will see bits of it in the commission's report.
We have already established that the Liberal government closely mirrors the previous Conservative government in many things, so let us not expect too much. If we look at the Conservative approach we do not need to talk too much about the performance of that group of politicians and their pension reform policy. The Canadian electorate said all there was to say about that in the last election. Since the last election, as I have said, we have 111 Conservative members of Parliament picking up pensions ranging from about $26,000 to $82,000.
This private member's bill addresses double dipping which is now defined as a former member of Parliament who is employed by the Government of Canada, an agency of the Government of Canada or a crown corporation. I am happy to see that defined because there was some question from time to time about what double dipping actually was.
It also covers vesting or collecting the payoff at age 60. There were some problems with that. What is not addressed here is that there are people in the country who could get elected at age 55 and under this private member's bill could get a pension at age 60. They would get it in five years, not six as it is today. We have to look at both these combinations.
This private member's bill reflects a modest attempt to correct the outrageous self-indulgence both Liberals and Conservatives have provided themselves over the years at the expense of the taxpayer. It is ironic after the last two decades when we have been going into debt year after year after year and overspending in our budgets that we are sitting here looking at a private member's bill. These kinds of things should have been looked at some time ago. It is a little bit but it is a little bit too late.
Since the beginning the Reform Party's policy has been to ensure that politicians could not collect a pension until age 60. We wanted to ensure that double dipping could not occur by two means. The first is no vesting of benefits, should a past MP obtain a position with the government or any of its agencies or corporations. The second most important aspect of double dipping is to eliminate all the patronage that is going on in the first place. The only way double dipping occurs is after an MP leaves his or her seat and gets appointed to this board, that board, this corporation and so on.