Mr. Speaker, this amendment may be one of the single most important amendments which have come forward. I believe nearly every witness I heard at committee commented on the management and investment of our retirement fund. They said that this 20% rule should be changed, that it should be lifted. This amendment, of course, would do that.
Currently, pension funds in Canada are limited with respect to freedom of investment. Only one-fifth or 20% can be invested offshore.
To put this in context, the global capital pool is very large and Canadian investments comprise only 3% of it. In other words, Canadians are expected, indeed forced, to put almost all of their investments upon which their retirement security depends into a very small capital pool. This does not give us the best return and the best security.
As the member who just spoke indicated, it substantially limits the kind of return we can hope to achieve. It does not maximize the investment return which we can hope to achieve.
This is particularly important for poorer Canadians. People who have money, who have companies registered offshore, who have family trusts and all of those good things can diversify their assets to the point where this rule does not substantially hurt them. However, for lower income Canadians who have almost all of their retirement savings invested by these mandatory payments into the Canada pension plan, this restriction and the consequential limitation of the investment return they hope to receive means a great deal. If we want to provide particularly low-income Canadians with a secure portion of retirement that they can count on, we simply have to get rid of this 20% foreign investment rule.
As I said, this is not just something that a couple of opposition parties are talking about, although certainly if we think so, that should be persuasive. We are joined by almost every single witness that appeared before the committee, including actuaries, accountants, pension fund managers, economists, analysts of all kinds, some of the most respected thinkers in this country.
I wish that it was the finance minister's name on here as the mover of this amendment. That would indicate that we were going to get this matter taken care of. Since it was an opposition member who had the wit and the courage to put this forward, I would certainly hope that all members of the House would support this amendment. If they do not support any other one, I would say this is the one to support, particularly for the benefit of the most vulnerable members of our society who need the best return we can possibly give them on their pension and retirement investment.