Madam Speaker, we have before us for discussion Bill C-208 which proposes amendments to the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act, amendments which seek to end double dipping and delay commencement of pension benefits to a former member until he or she reaches age 60.
I will confine my remarks to the bill's treatment of double dipping. My hon. colleague from Nepean will address the problems raised by the proposed provisions dealing with delayed receipt of benefits to former members and survivors.
When I refer to double dipping I am referring to the simultaneous drawing of both a pension under the Members of Parliament Retirement Allowances Act and a salary or other payment from the Government of Canada. The government has announced that it intends to curtail this practice. Indeed, the right hon. Prime Minister has on several occasions stated that the government is committed to ending double dipping. The bill purports to do this but it must be said that the approach adopted here is seriously flawed.
First, the proposed section 13.1 would remove the re-employed former member's entitlement altogether rather than just suspend that entitlement during the period of re-employment.
Obvious inequities would then result since there is no provision to reinstate the former member's pension when his or her re-employment terminated as inevitably would occur. The bill would appear to impose a lifetime pension disentitlement for a former member. This surely could not have been its intent.
Second, the term "remuneration" is not defined and the proposed scope of the source of that remuneration is very wide. Crown corporation directors' fees and per diems for even short periods of part time service to the Government of Canada would be caught by this very broad definition, as would contract fees, even though receipt of pension had already been taken into account when those fees were set.
As the bill is drafted, receipt of any remuneration no matter how little the amount would disentitle a former member from receiving any pension at all. As I mentioned that disentitlement would appear to be for life.
Third, the bill provides no mechanism to allow the pension administration to monitor possible cases of re-employment. Therefore there would be no way of knowing if and when a former member started to receive remuneration in another capacity from the Government of Canada, especially since there is no requirement in the bill for former members to report their re-employment and remuneration.
This leads to a related problem. No provision is made in the bill for the recovery of overpayments of pension, overpayments which would inevitably arise since the administration would have no sure way of knowing that re-employment had occurred and that the pension entitlement should be terminated. Recovery of such overpayments could prove difficult, expensive and time consuming at a time when government resources must be husbanded very carefully.
In conclusion, the bill would put an end to double dipping but it would not do so in a fair and even-handed way. I wish to state again that the government fully intends to curtail this practice which has attracted so much criticism. However, it wants to adopt a more disciplined and integrated approach taking into account all aspects of a member of Parliament's compensation.
As hon. members are aware, the government has received the recommendations regarding members' compensation from a firm of consultants engaged by the previous government.
These recommendations have been referred to the Lapointe commission which must report to the House by mid-July of this year. Rather than rushing into law seriously flawed legislation such as the bill before us now, the more prudent approach for dealing with the issue of double dipping for persons under the pension plan seems to be to await the deliberations of the Lapointe commission. The recommendations of the commission can then be studied carefully in the course of the government's consideration of its options for reform of the pension plan, a consideration of options which would be carried out in a context of the overall compensation package provided for members of Parliament.