Mr. Speaker, the name of my riding is quite appropriate today since I have a bad cold. That is another story.
Today begins a very gripping debate on proposed amendments to Bill C-2. Those Canadians who watch the proceedings of this House will probably want to be reminded that Bill C-2 deals with the proposed changes by the government to the Canada pension plan.
This stage of the proceedings is called report stage where the bill is reported to the House. Amendments are proposed to the bill for the House to vote on. Then the bill goes into third reading or final debate stage before it is voted on.
These are amendments now that we are talking about today to the CPP bill. There are six groups of amendments and we are now discussing Group No. 1.
Group No. 1 has six different amendments in it. I assume they are all grouped together because they deal with accountability. Under this bill there is a big fund of money set up and it is managed by people who will be talked about later.
This group of amendments talks about how the fund managers need to report and account for their actions. There were six amendments put forward to deal with this. These were not the only amendments to deal with the way the fund managers operate and are accountable.
There were quite a number of amendments, as the previous speaker mentioned, put forward at the committee stage. All those were voted down by the Liberal majority even though, as has been said, the opposition was, in a rare show of good sense, unanimous in supporting the amendments which would have made the account and its management a great deal more open and transparent.
Considering that they have in their hot little hands a large chunk of our retirement security, one would think that the more we can do to make this thing open and accountable and transparent, we would be eager, willing and prepared to do that.
Unfortunately there does seem to be some reluctance on the part of some members from the government to do that.
Let me talk briefly about the six amendments that have been put forward because I support all but one of them, just so the public knows what the opposition and the government are proposing to make this fund a little more accountable.
The first motion is the one that has been spoken about by my colleague from the NDP. Essentially what that does is say that the cabinet can set up a panel of experts to review the conflict of interest procedures which the directors, the board that manages this fund, put into place.
In a sense the cabinet appoints the fund managers and this amendment says the cabinet can appoint some experts to breath down the necks of the fund managers. In a way it is political appointees looking over the shoulder of other political appointees.
I suppose we could wish there were a bit more arm's length arrangement to all this. However, it is a step in the right direction. At least somebody, even if a political appointee, is going to look over the shoulders of these board managers and it seems to me that gives us at least another kind of avenue of comfort to know that somebody has some review mechanism or review responsibility for these conflict of interest procedures.
We certainly do not want these conflict of interest procedures to be like the cabinet conflict of interest procedures we heard much about but have never seen. There seems to be this sort of talk about conflict of interest procedures but nobody sees them, nobody really seems to be able to make sure they are followed. It would be very useful, at least in this case, to move in that direction.
So we do support that amendment by the NDP.
The next amendment is one by my colleague from the PC party. We have just heard about this, so I will not go on at any length. Instead of an auditor being appointed every year, year by year, it gives the auditor a term of five years.
There are two important things here. One is of course that the auditor has some staying power in this whole scheme of things. There is no revolving door of auditors where someone comes in cold. This is a huge fund. It manages literally billions of dollars and it does take some knowledge and expertise to do a proper audit.
So rather than having a possible revolving door of auditors, there is somebody who has a grip on the thing and some stability and some tenure and who can look after it. As the proposer of the amendment mentioned, if the auditor were not doing their job, they could certainly be booted out the door before five years, but there would be some good reason to do so.
The other thing to mention is that this five year term, generally speaking, would outlive a government, so to speak. We would not have quite so much of the auditing of the thing tied to whomever is in power at a particular time. I think this is an excellent amendment and should be supported.
The third amendment is by the government. I do not know if the government intends to speak to it. It is a good amendment.
The act presently provides that a special examination of the operations of the board may be carried out at least once every six years. In other words, there may be no special examination at all. This amendment changes “may” to “shall” so there has to be a special examination at least once every six years. Again, it is a step in the right direction. This is our retirement at stake. To mandate a special examination on top of some of the other accountability measures surely would not be amiss. So we support that.
The government is also bringing in what I call the amendment from the hon. member from Prince George—Bulkley Valley because that member of the Reform Party challenged the finance minister in question period on the fact that the auditor general was not the entity or the person with the audit responsibility for this huge fund.
It seems strange to us that Parliament appoints an auditor general to oversee the operations of government but somehow this huge fund of billions of dollars had its own auditor whom the board, appointed by the cabinet, chose. We feel very strongly that the auditor general should have every ability and every bit of information necessary to conduct his own audit of this fund, and this amendment would allow that.
We commend the government on this amendment. In fact, it is the very first time it has agreed to such a measure, because in committee it turned all these kinds of measures down.
However, now that the auditor general has had a word with it, the government has recognized that it cannot have an auditor general of a country and have an aspect of the operations of government, particularly such a large aspect, not explicitly subject to his operations.
With respect to the motion I have introduced, it would require that the schedule of rates charged under the CPP, the contribution levels, not be changed except after reasonable public hearings. Presently the act says it can be changed by cabinet. We say no. If people are going to have to pay more bucks they should at least get to say something about it. We say there would have to be public hearings before changes are made.
I would like to have said a few passionate words about Motion No. 24, but unfortunately I do not have time. However, the motion has been ably spoken to by the NDP member and I will leave it at that.
I believe these are good amendments and I hope they will be supported by the House.