Madam Speaker, I support the amendment just brought forward. The member is absolutely right.
Basically what we are talking about is retroactive taxation which I think most of us on all sides of this House would find most unsavoury. What it does is eat away at government's capital in the sense of confidence.
I do not think most Canadians can accept that. It means that at the end of the taxation year we are going to have to ante up more money for the government.
How many of us going into 1997 thought that was going to happen? I would submit not very many Canadians would expect the government to bring in a bill that is going to add to contributions already paid. There is something wrong with that.
The reason the government has the problem with regard to the Canada pension plan is that it simply failed to deal with that reality over the last number of years. Having failed to deal with that reality, it has to make up ground. Let us take a look at some past administrations. The person who comes to mind is a prime minister who was here long before our time, Mackenzie King.
That is what this government reminds me of, that type of leadership. I think if I could summarize how Mackenzie King operated, he operated on the basis that if someone waits long enough the problem will go away.
I think the present Prime Minister operates under that same formula. If you wait long enough, the problem will go away, so let's not touch it, let's not deal with it, because if you deal with it, it means that you would have to exercise that rare commodity that we call leadership.
When they took office in 1993, that was a problem facing them as a government. If they took a look at the numbers today, what they would have to do to fix the problem is multiply it tenfold.
Had they dealt with the problem in 1993, the exaggerated rates of payment or the premiums that all Canadians are going to pay would have been much less. They were operating on the premise that no, we do not have to deal with it today, the problem will disappear. It has not disappeared.
I think any financial analyst and anyone with any kind of thinking mind at all would have told the government then that the problem would not disappear, and they did. Canadians were warning the government what would happen.
Some of them were in this House. It could be the member standing and speaking because we all knew what was going to happen. The sad part about this horrendous increase in these premiums is that it is the young Canadians who are going to be paying the price for the present government's mistakes.
That is the tragedy in the whole equation. None of us mind paying our own way and that is the way it is supposed to be. However, the present CPP pensioners deserve what they have. None of us argue with that but the unfunded liability in the CPP amounts to $600 billion. That is spelled with a b , $600 billion.
Basically what we have now is a pay-as-you-go scheme that is quickly going broke. The demographics and the age differences and percentages in terms of the individuals who are retired now and the number of individuals working, that equation just will not support the system.
In future years that equation is going to be weighted too much on the retirement side. Again, the government knew that this was coming. It is like a freight train. It could be seen coming down the rails. The light is there. It is on the track. It is coming.
A collision can either be avoided by drawing back or by doing a number of things, but the government chose not to do it. Now we are looking at the most regressive of all legislation I think to enter this House in a number of years.
We are talking about a huge tax increase.
We can talk about it as being a premium, but anything that comes out of our pay cheques at the end of the week is a tax no matter how we want to word it. What this is is a hidden tax. It is a silent killer of jobs.
What we are suggesting as a party, and a responsible position, is that the government over the last number of years has built up this huge surplus in the unemployment insurance fund. Right now it has a surplus of about $12 billion, and that is spelled with a b as well. What is the government doing with that? The finance minister is using it to fudge the deficit numbers.
What we are suggesting is to simply reduce the unemployment insurance premiums that are paid by all Canadians. In all fairness to the government, it reduced it by a mere 20¢ last week. However, it could be reduced by at least 70¢ or 90¢ if it wanted to but it chooses not to do it because it wants to use those numbers and that fund for its own political purposes.
The finance minister is certainly not going to let the minister responsible for the unemployment insurance act or CPP use any of those funds other than for debt reduction or deficit reduction which is where the unfairness lies. If the government took those moneys today and said “Let's reduce the amount that we are paying into the EI fund, it would neutralize those increases in the Canada pension plan”. At the end of the day the workers in your constituency and the workers in my constituency are going to look at their pay cheque and it is going to be the same.
In other words, what we need is a reduction in some of those other taxes to offset the increases in the Canada pension plan. We cannot be totally naive. The government has put off the problem for five years and the problem has now compounded to the point where it has to go in there with a big hit.
I am going back to where I opened my remarks in this debate. It is like the old Mackenzie King philosophy: Wait and the problem will take care of itself. It has not taken care of itself. The government has provided no leadership at all.
In regard to the motion we are speaking on, I support that amendment in the legislation which would eliminate the retroactivity that is going to hurt every working Canadian in this country.
I am going to get off the topic a little bit. Yesterday in question period I and some of the other members had the same question for the health minister. I am going to point this out because it is the lack of leadership in solving a problem that we are talking about.
Yesterday I mentioned to the health minister the need to address the 12,000 hepatitis C sufferers in Canada as a result of the incompetence of the federal government to recognize a problem a number of years ago. The result is that we have 12,000 Canadians infected and compensation has to be paid.