People who travel for a living are reimbursed for their mileage expenditures. That is fairly standard. The hon. member opposite knows that.
People in the educational sector, those who travel from school to school, get a travel allowance. The hon. member knows the answers to all these questions. He is just trying to be funny. Heaven forbid that he would not know better than what he is pretending today. If he does not, maybe it is a lost cause.
Those are the comments I want to make with respect to the bill which is presently before the House.
At some point in the future, perhaps not in this Parliament, because I do not see how it could be done, I would like to see the whole issue of compensation for MPs revisited. There have been two reports in this Parliament which both recommended an overall increase in benefits. Of course that will not happen.
We even had a party which pretended that MPs should receive 15 per cent less. Some of them adhered to that principle, others pretended to do it and others did not. We never knew which was which. The scheme was abandoned because it was not appropriate. The public was being fooled.
Some of them said that they were not using their tax free allowance and were giving it back. However, once the MPs' pension was reduced they said that they would keep it to create their own pension scheme.
The Reform Party's preachings in this area are a little less than totally sincere.
It has been a pleasure to speak to this bill which would require all pension or retiring allowance payments paid from public funds to be deducted from the member's sessional allowance.
However, there are certain aspects that are not given sufficient clarification in the hon. member's proposal. First, some public pension plans are not paid from public funds. That is number one.
There are entities in this country that are neither public nor private, in other words, they are sort of in-between. And finally, of course, even if a pension is public, that does not necessarily mean it is subsidized by the government or by the public jurisdiction concerned.
As far as I am concerned, I do not intend to support this bill and I would urge my fellow members to do likewise.