Thank you very much. That is just what we need, a bunch of senators managing $200 billion public dollars.
The Department of Finance has produced several studies and reports. The Bank of Canada, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and virtually every credible economic think tank in Canada will confirm that payroll taxes kill jobs. The biggest killer of jobs in terms of taxation are higher payroll taxes.
We are now in the 78th straight month of unemployment at over 9%, with 17% youth unemployment that reaches 25% in some regions of the country. Families have been undergoing diminished disposable income for the past 15 years. Even though they are working harder, they are coming home with less. What does the government want to do? It wants to raise those taxes even higher and go against all of the conventional economic wisdom which says that will reduce job growth and mean fewer opportunities for Canadians to get a leg up in the tough new 21st century economy.
There is an option. Yes, we do have an unfunded liability and the country has to make some difficult decisions on how to deal with that unfunded liability. There are no easy choices. As I said at the outset, this party and I think all reasonable Canadians are committed to fully respecting and honouring the commitments that have been made to Canadians concerning their pension benefits. We are committed to that, but it will cost money to honour those obligations.
However, there is a way to fully fund those benefits while at the same time giving younger Canadians better pensions and better retirement security. That is to look at some of the reforms that have been proposed by very respectable mainstream organizations. The C.D Howe Institute has produced several papers proposing the conversion of the defined benefit Canada pension plan Ponzi scheme into a mandatory private retirement savings vehicle, a proposal which has been seconded by the World Bank, an organization which is in part funded and supported by the government, as well as many other think tanks around the world.
Governments around the world are coming to grips with the same problem that Canada is now encountering. Last summer I attended a conference in Budapest attended by economists from welfare state countries around the world. They talked about how to convert these defined benefit pension plans into pensions that are fully funded, mandatory private retirement savings vehicles.
Reform has offered such an alternative and I wish members opposite would take this idea seriously. If young Canadians were allowed to make a payroll contribution to a private investment vehicle and got a modest rate of return of 6% a year, they would end up with an annuity of over $250,000, producing an annual retirement income of nearly $24,000 a year, a far sight better than the measly $8,800 offered by the government. Better pensions at lower cost seem to make too much sense for the Liberals opposite.
I would like to close my remarks by saying that the House has a unique opportunity to really grasp the future. Members should think about the impact that this will have on their grandchildren and the taxes they will be forced to pay. Members should forget about their own interests for a moment if it is possible. Maybe they would give up their MP pension plan if they really started doing that. Members should forget about their own benefits for a moment and think about their grandchildren. If they do that, I have enough faith in the sincerity and good sense of members opposite that they will embrace a real alternative for Canada and for its future by embracing a private mandatory retirement savings plan, as we have proposed.