Mr. Speaker, this is one time I really regret not having an opportunity to ask a question of the previous speaker, the member for Calgary Southeast, rather than having a 10-minute speech.
The question I would have asked him pertains to his continued attacks on the MP pension plan. One does not like to hear old time rhetoric from supposedly new style politicians.
As it happens, when he attacks the MP pension plan, he alludes to the fact that in the last Parliament the majority of Reform MPs, all but one, opted out of the pension plan. That was by statute. We had to make a legislative change because the pension plan for parliamentarians is mandatory. What has been the case of the MPs of the Reform Party of the class of '97 recently elected?
A change of statute, a vote in this Parliament, is required for the MPs of the class of '97 to have the option of opting out of the MP pension plan. Instead of moving legislation or proposing a private member's bill, what the Reform Party has done is that each one of the class of '97 has written to Treasury Board saying they want to opt out of the MP pension plan.
The problem with that is, as they should know, Treasury Board does not have the power to act. It can only be done by statute.
The question I would like to have put to the member for Calgary Southeast, and I am sorry he does not have an opportunity to reply, is whether he is prepared right now to move a private member's bill, which he can write himself, giving MPs the option of opting out of the pension plan. If the Reform Party were really sincere in all it says, it should have done this long ago.
The rest of my speech has to do with the accountability, a term MPs opposite seem to like to throw around, of what has been said in debate by the opposition parties, chiefly the Leader of the Opposition.
I listened with great care to the speech of the member for Calgary Southwest because I am a great believer that, in this Parliament, when the opposition speaks it must speak constructively. It has an important role in making legislation better.
I did not find the kind of constructive criticism that I would like to have found from the Leader of the Opposition. Instead I found, for example, the Leader of the Opposition criticizing Bill C-2 because it does not have a preamble. He says the reason it should have a preamble is so the courts will know how to interpret the legislation. He actually says there is a legal reason and that every time Parliament passes a statute it has to make its intent crystal clear.
If the hon. member for Calgary Southwest had consulted with a competent lawyer he would have been told that a preamble has no legal force in the courts. When a judge approaches legislation for interpretation he is not required in any way to follow the preamble. The legal profession disparagingly refers to preambles in legislation as the pious hope clause.
When there is a preamble in legislation it is usually a political smoke screen which comes out of the department that writes the legislation, usually the Department of Justice.
I will give the House a perfect example of a misleading preamble. It is the preamble to Bill C-46, which the party opposite fully supported at third reading. That bill had to do with restricting the rights of the accused in obtaining records from therapists in sexual assault trials. Remember that the opposition party completely supported that bill. It had a wonderful preamble which outlined how it would protect the rights of victims, how it would do this, that and the other thing. It outlined how the legislation would obey the charter.
Within months of getting through Parliament it is being challenged in Alberta because it defies natural justice. It destroys the right of the accused to defend themselves. It has also been challenged in and overturned by the courts of Ontario.
This is the case of a preamble which was put into legislation that was fundamentally bad. Learned parliamentarians on all sides of the House supported a law which should not have been supported.
I suggest that the hon. member for Calgary Southwest, instead of proposing that bills have preambles, should be condemning preambles. Legislation speaks for itself clause by clause.
The hon. member for Calgary Southwest talked forever about payroll taxes. The point he was trying to make was that increases to CPP premiums are a tax. He cited all kinds of academics to prove the point that the increases to CPP premiums are a tax.
It is certainly true that no one likes to talk about a new tax, be it in Parliament or anywhere in the country. Certainly the government would prefer not to talk about it as a tax. The reasoning is that because the government does not directly collect the tax one should not think of it as being a tax.
The argument was not fully developed by the hon. member for Calgary Southwest. The argument is if it is mandatory, if it is taken off a worker's payroll, then it is a tax. It is a tax because it is mandatory. The hon. member for Calgary Southwest said the government is not being genuine because it is really a tax.
What do we find later in his speech? He talks about super RRSPs which are mandatory. In other words, the other party, while condemning the government for proposing a pension tax, is proposing a tax itself. It is a matter of semantics. Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of the language. The reality is that a mandatory super RRSP is a tax as well.
Finally I come to the issue of accountability. The Leader of the Opposition condemned Bill C-2 because he felt it merely required annual reports and proper reporting by the investment board which will be responsible for the funds under its charge, which is a huge innovation in the bill to turn the management of the pension funds over to an investment panel which will invest them in the open market and do so wisely.
Again the member for Calgary Southwest missed the point. Instead of condemning the fact that Bill C-2 wanted reporting he really should have gone after the bill and said that this is the kind of reporting we want. I do not blush as a government member to warn my government that I am dissatisfied with this aspect of the bill. What is missing from the bill is an itemized account of what we expect from this investment board when it presents its annual report.
We want to know the remuneration of the executives. We want to know the cost of administration and management. We want to know the investment plan. We want to know investment performance. Rather than condemning the government, and Bill C-2 because it wants annual reports, the Leader of the Opposition missed an opportunity for valid criticism and he has left it again to the government backbenchers to warn the government that it has not fully examined the bill. I hope the committee will look very carefully at this whole matter of what kind of accountability there should be.
I also listened very carefully to the remarks of the member for Sherbrooke. He is the leader of the fifth party, I believe. We find Sesame Street economics. This member condemned the bill because it took $11 billion out of the economy over six years. Somehow he does not seem to understand that this investment board is going to reinvest it in the economy, in the open market. It will reinvest the money in Canada.
Later the member for Sherbrooke complained that he wanted RRSPs to be permitted to invest 50% in foreign investment instead of 20%. He is proposing that Canadian pension funds be invested outside Canada. He is not interested in investing in Canada, and no wonder. That party did not succeed very well in the election of 1993.