Let me talk about the opt out once again. I want government members, even though they are going to march in here and vote for the bill, to seriously consider the opt out. The opt out is not ideal. I have said this before and I will say it again, the ideal situation is a fair pension plan for members of Parliament, not nothing but not too generous. Since those are the choices, I would suggest we opt out.
What the government is doing to convince the public that this is okay is simply not working. I have made some reference already to the tactic. One has been to misquote figures, to try and rationalize this as somehow not really better than what anyone else is getting. Nobody believes that. Not an expert in the country will come forward to verify those numbers.
The other attempt to rationalize this has been to basically slander various Reform members of Parliament. For example, the member for Beaver River is opportunistic in opting out. There have been other slanders and fabrications against her which I will not get into.
It is also said that ex-military members are double dipping. This is an interesting definition of double dipping. Suddenly all Canadians, who after having had a career and qualifing for a pension in a normal way and who enter a second career, are somehow double dipping. Now we have hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are now defined as double dippers.
There was the great one members actually thought they had going for a few days which was that the member for Calgary Centre had advocated massive pay increases when, in fact, what he was suggesting was that the government be transparent about the salaries the MPs are actually being paid, taking into consideration all the benefits, all of their untaxed allowances and all their accrued pensions.
What is interesting about all of these things is that they are not in the bill. That definition of double dipping is not in the government's legislation. The government, while it continues to raise the compensation issue, did not raise it in the legislation. It is only a bill on MP pensions.
There has been a lot of talk about the pay issue but I want to get something on the record because my views on the pay issue are a little different than most of the people in the House and probably a little different from some members of my party. This party has consistently said: "Cut the pension to normal with no pay increase whatsoever". We tabled amendments to that effect and the Liberal members all voted against them.
However, let me talk about the process of determining pay. There have been commissions to study the pay issue. In fact, one thing we noticed when we had the committee hearings for one day was that the commissions appointed by this federal government such as the Lapointe or Sobeco study, had considerably more generous views of remuneration than some of the commissions that had been appointed in the provinces. All of them had concluded that MPs or ex-MPs were basically underpaid and they gave some reasons for that which deserve study. However let us be very clear about how they arrived at that conclusion.
First, all these commissions proceed by essentially asking members of Parliament and former members of Parliament what they do, how much they could earn elsewhere and how much they think it is worth. That is essentially how the commissions operate. They then come up with a recommendation that we are all underpaid. They accept the stories that all members of Parliament tend to tell, which is that prior to coming here they had brilliant careers and were earning hundreds of thousands of dollars somewhere else. Some were. As we all know, the member for Calgary Centre was. The Minister of Justice was. There are some other members who had very brilliant careers both in this House and in the previous Houses.
However, that is not always true. Before I was elected, I worked around here and I know about some of the brilliant careers.
The second story told is that all members of Parliament do valuable work while they are here. They work long and hard hours all the time, on critical tasks of great importance to the nation and their constituents.
The third story told is that through no fault of their own, members suddenly find that when they are turfed out of office, despite their previous brilliance and their brilliance while here, they find themselves virtually unemployable and can find no work.
There are elements of truth in all of these statements but I do not think we should accept them at face value. Some of these commissions should have examined this a little more closely. I will not talk about careers. As I say, some people clearly have had good careers and some people, depending on their occupational background, have an chance at adjusting back into the workforce. I know the member for Halton-Peel and I have discussed the fact that certain occupations are given to readjustment to the workforce while others are not.
I would like to talk for a minute on this one point about the valuable and hard work because it is important. It is time we started calling a spade a spade around here. Have we worked hard this week? You had better believe it, Madam Speaker. We have worked bloody hard. We have been up every day this week until midnight and 1 a.m. voting on bills.
What about those votes? Those votes were all predetermined. There were no surprises in any of them, although there were a couple of little surprises, but all of these votes were predetermined. In fact, they were so predetermined that half of the time people did not even know what they were voting on. However, they certainly did not need to know what they were voting on even if they did.
The question that the taxpayers should be asking is not whether this is hard work, because this is hard work, but whether it is valuable work. They should be asking whether staying up all night to go through these rituals has been worth a hell of a lot of money to them.
Let me mention another example. We sat in a committee all day. We had flown in witnesses from across the country to study the MP pension bill. They came in early in the morning and we sat there all day, morning, afternoon and evening. Did we stop for five minutes to review or discuss any of the committee testimony to determine whether there was anything in it that might apply to the legislation? No. We proceeded to clause by clause consideration and did the bill in 12 minutes. Therefore, we went through the ritual of flying these people in and hearing from them.
The question once again is: Hard work costs a lot of money. Was it of any value? The truth is, and this is not a phenomenon restricted to Canada but certainly one that has become worse here, that many MPs play very little or any real legislative role. It does not matter whether they are ignoring their constituents' views, their election commitments or their personal principles and knowledge, we know that most MPs will simply vote with the party no matter what the bill is about and whether they have read it or not.
What really is the value of that? What really is the equivalent to that? Is that equivalent, as some would tell us, to being a senior executive? If that is the way the government and others believe the House of Commons should work, maybe MPs are regional sales reps for their political parties. Maybe that is the comparison we should be making.
I am just giving another point of view. An independent commission should look at those kinds of issues. Maybe it would end up not looking at how we are remunerated but what we are doing around here and whether we can make it more effective.
There is one little item of which I have to make some mention. I normally do not talk at all about my personal life but let me digress for a second. In the committee meeting, the President of the Treasury Board said, and the parliamentary secretary repeated it today, that before we opt out of these pensions we should consult our families. He said that we were really doing our families wrong by doing this. It was a valuable suggestion.
I got married just after I came to the House. I have been married a year and a half. I am starting to understand this marriage thing. I said: "Before I opt out I should really consult my wife. It concerns the future and our future". I thought it was the right thing to do to opt out but I thought: "Yes, this wise advice. I should consult my wife". The treasury board president, the expert on family values that he is, advised me to do this.
I talked to my wife Laureen and explained that this potentially could be very expensive for us. I tried to explain it to her. This point is important because in the riding she talks to people. She is in touch with her family. She is not in this cocoon. She said to me: "There may be some truth in what you are saying but the reality is that both you and I know that the pension plan is way too generous. We know what the public thinks about it and we know what it is". She said: "You did not get elected to rip off the taxpayers. Frankly, if you or I ever find ourselves in a financial situation on the job or any other job where we are doing that, then we had better find other work". That is the only way to look at this.
Reform MPs in opting out are not making a political point on a particular day. Let me be very clear to Liberal members about this, those who are thinking of participating. In opting out we are making a solemn pact with the taxpayers. The pact is the following. This pension plan is not reformed satisfactorily. It is
not an acceptable plan. By opting out we have no stake in it whatsoever.
The government can refuse future opt outs and it can grandfather the present recipients if it wants but if we form the government we have no vested interest whatsoever in this scam. When we have the chance to put in a plan, if this is not changed, there will be no grandfathering. There will be no trough regular and trough lite. We will take every legal step necessary to cut benefits that were not adequately contributed to by members of Parliament. We will lead by example in reforming the fiscal situation of this country. We will start here and we will not spare the people who made the decision to opt into that plan. That is our commitment.