Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House at third reading of Bill C-85 on reform of members' retiring allowances. I rise as the official opposition critic on parliamentary reform.
I would like to say right off that the objective that we in the Bloc Quebecois and the official opposition wished to achieve in the reform was twofold. First, because we shared the concern of all taxpayers in Quebec and Canada, we knew very well that a pension plan that allowed members to collect both pensions and federal civil service salaries could not continue. We also knew that the absence of a specific age limit for qualifying for a pension was unacceptable, because taxpayers were seeing people after just six years of parliamentary service getting an immediate pension at the age of 30 or 35 or 40. It was unacceptable. It was unfair.
So those aspects were our two targets, shared by the taxpayer, and I think that Bill C-85 is confirmation that both have been met.
However, I would like to recall that we tabled an amendment to this bill that was designed to prevent former members who were currently double dipping from continuing to do so. The government preferred not to incorporate our amendment. Instead, the restriction on double dipping will come into effect only when the bill becomes law, thus leaving plenty of government employees drawing both their pension and their salary. I am thinking, among others, of the ambassador to Paris, Benoît Bouchard, who gets both a pension and a salary.
I think it would have been very useful if the government had agreed to make the system fair for everyone immediately.
I would also like to add, in the course of these remarks, that in the end the total value of members' pensions strikes me as a small matter in comparison with a more useful way of recovering money and reducing government expenditure: the abolition of the Senate, the other House. If the $45 million and more that goes on salaries and services for the Senate could have been tackled, we could have saved an enormous amount of money.
One of the distinctive things about the western world is its democratic systems of government. Universal suffrage is indisputably the element in a revolution that at the start of this century allowed a number of western societies to achieve, rapidly, unprecedented economic development and to experience the emergence of the mass consumer society we know today.
However, western democratic society has not eliminated all inequalities, nor does it really hold the promise of a better world where all men and women would be equal, a society where poverty and misery would no longer occur. Social classes continue to exist, with their different levels of wealth, their injustices. We live in the very heart of economic liberalism. If democracy is a synonym for political freedom, it is also the home of economic freedom.
There are members of Parliament in our society, certainly, but there are also professionals, welfare recipients, people without jobs, CEOs of big and small companies, civil servants, tramps. We do not all have the same lot in life. We live in a society with social classes. And it is an illusion to think that everyone is treated equitably.
The debate on members' pensions, in my opinion, serves as a way of avoiding a much more fundamental debate that needs to be held on poverty and power. We have to expose the illusory democracy that screens us from the human misery in our societies. We have to attack the system's real profiteers. There are profiteers in the Canadian parliamentary system, and to focus exclusively on members' pensions, without calling among other things for abolition of the Senate, is serious political irrelevance and evidence of boundless bad faith.
The cost of the parliamentary pension plan is insignificant compared to what has to be paid out of the public purse to maintain Senate appointments and the institution itself.
One of the Reform Party's main election promises was to make cuts in what the party calls the "three Ps": members' pay, pensions and privileges. The Reform Party calculates that a significant reduction in members' pensions would result in savings on the order of $1.5 million over five years.
According to Jean Dion, columnist for Le Devoir , ``the savings that could be made by slashing members' benefits are hard to calculate''.
Following the last election, the pensions to be paid to defeated members were estimated at $109 million over 20 years, or a quarter of 1 per cent of the deficit for 1992-93 alone. Now, the total budget for senators is $42.6 million a year. Over 20 years, if you consider the costs of upkeep for the premises the Senate occupies, the cost to the taxpayer is, by comparison, more than $1 billion.
That is what I would call shameless exploitation of a country's citizens, who pay out of their taxes the salaries and pensions of people they never elected. A senator is a member of a political species that lives off the poor in our society. The Senate is nothing but a pretext for whatever government is currently in power to reward its cronies, be they Tory or Grit.
The Senate is an institution with no democratic legitimacy. Its members are appointed by the Governor General, who by convention acts on the initiative and advice of the Prime Minister, who submits a list of names to him. Because senators are not elected, the official opposition, the Bloc Quebecois, considers the Upper House a political anachronism and convincing proof of the obsolescence of the Canadian federal system.
We in the Bloc Quebecois have grasped that one of the great weaknesses of the Canadian parliamentary system is not the members' pension plan but rather the very existence of a Senate. The existence of the Canadian Senate is a vestige of the traditional elitist form of representation that is supposed in some way to balance the democratic legitimacy of the elected members of the House of Commons.
From 1925 to 1963, the average age of a senator was 69. In 1975 it was 64. A Senate seat, as the whole world knows, is a prize for someone at the end of his career. He will not need to fight to keep his seat, because the salary is guaranteed until he reaches 75. That is what I call a golden retirement. That is what I call the real problem. That is the real scandal of the Canadian parliamentary system and the democratic system in which it has developed.
I think that the government in power, the Liberals, and the Reform Party too, should have gone after the really pointless expenditures. Lacking the courage to attack the Senate, which represents a pointless expenditure, they referred instead to cut members' pensions. We recognize that they accomplished what they set out to do, and that it is an improvement, but as I have shown, the money they hope to recover is just a little more than a million dollars over twenty years.
If we got rid of the Senate, we could save over $42 million a year. The goal of reviewing sessional allowances or members' pensions can never, in any way, be a means of putting the country's finances on a sounder footing, or fighting the deficit, or achieving the great collective ideals of equality and wealth in our sacrosanct democracy. This debate is just something to placate the people, and bills making changes to members' retiring allowances-remember Bill C-270, brought in by the NDP, Bill C-236, brought in by the Liberals, Bill C-208, brought in by the Conservatives-are just ways for this House to assuage its conscience.
On July 20, 1994, the Commission to Review Allowances of Members of Parliament tabled its report. It made the following points: the number of former members receiving a pension is not what is commonly believed. To go by the press, every parliamentarian who ceases to sit gets a retiring allowance. But in fact only half of the members who retired over the past decade received an allowance. Since 1984, only 42 per cent of retirees have received an allowance.
The report goes on to state that the public sometimes has the impression that parliamentarians who retire do so with an excessively large pension.
In fact, most pensions paid to parliamentarians in the past decade were between $10,000 and $40,000. Actually, 57.2 per cent of them are below $30,000 and 90.4 per cent are below $50,000.
"One might also think, the report goes on to say, that a disproportionate percentage of retirement benefits are paid to persons below the age of 55. But this is absolutely not the case since only 13 per cent of retired MPs receiving benefits are below 55".
According to the report, the Canadian parliamentary pension plan is quite comparable to those in other western democracies. Admittedly, this plan is one of the least demanding with regard to the minimum age at which benefits can be collected, but one of the strictest with regard to the contribution rate of the beneficiary; and it falls within the average with regard to the maximum authorized benefit.
As can be gathered from the report of the Commission to Review Allowances of Members, there is no reason to hold a real debate on the matter and it is no secret that the parliamentary discussions about MP pensions are merely a way of avoiding the real debate on the fundamental questions which are increasingly undermining the credibility of western democracies.
The Reform Party lays it on a bit thick. The great number of amendments which they tabled at the beginning of June look more like an insurance policy negotiated downward than an effort to prepare a serious piece of legislation.
I repeat, Bill C-85 on the reform of MP pensions in its present version responds entirely to the two main concerns of taxpayers in Quebec and in Canada with regard to equity.
First, the age at which a former MP can collect his pension is now set at 55. Secondly, a former MP can no longer receive both a pension and a salary paid by a government agency. The bill is unequivocal in that regard.
With this bill we have therefore attained the basic objectives which we have in common with taxpayers, but we would have liked the government to accept our amendment and apply it immediately to those in government and in the public service who currently benefit from double dipping.
I remind this House that we would also have preferred to deal effectively with the expenses of useless institutions like the Senate, which costs us tens of millions of dollars per year. All this for an institution which serves no useful purpose. It is simply a place-and the real place-for a golden retirement. A place to which men and women who have rendered or could render services to the government are appointed with a salary which is guaranteed until age 75. That is what I call an unacceptable golden retirement and that is where we have to get the money that is needed.
In closing, I remind this House that in this matter the official opposition is concerned about equity. We fundamentally believe that our amendments contained all that is needed to achieve this equity, namely two basic elements: the setting of the minimum age at 55 years and the elimination of double dipping.