Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up where the member for Qu'Appelle left off in his earlier remarks. I congratulate him at the same time for the work he has done on this important piece of legislation. The hon. member for Qu'Appelle said there should have been an overall look at pensions. Rather than that the government has endeavoured to do it with a piecemeal approach.
The government took the attitude that the sky was falling and that we had to move immediately. Our caucus would have preferred to have looked at the entire pension plan, including the old age security plan, the guaranteed income supplement and the Canada pension plan. Apparently those other reviews are being held over for another day. As a result this is a piecemeal approach which greatly concerns us.
At the end of the day the Canada pension plan will be less than what it was before. We are very concerned that when the government gets around to introducing the seniors benefit it will have a negative effect on the pension plan of seniors and their overall level of income.
Bill C-2 has failed people in just about every way imaginable. The government has failed to look at the plans overall. It has failed to allow the chief actuary to look at the projections of incomes and outflows and determine what he or she thinks will be the future of the pension plan.
As the member of Qu'Appelle said, the government failed to expand the earning base. The cutoff is $35,800. It does not matter whether one earns $100,000, $200,000 or perhaps a couple of million dollars a year. If one pays taxes in Canada the maximum cutoff on CPP is $35,800. It is clearly an unfair program contrasted with that of the United States where the cutoff works out, in Canadian dollars, to be about $88,000. It is clear what we are trying to get at. There would be a different level of fairness.
The minister is apparently saying that he will be prepared to look at the issue when it is reviewed in two or three years. We will certainly try to hold him to that commitment but one wonders why we could not have looked at it in this round of pension reform.
Bill C-2 is failing the people of Canada with the 10% cut to which my colleague referred earlier. Another area that could have been easily fixed is the dropout years for women who remained home a short number of years ago to raise their children. We see less and less of that today, but in the not so distant past families were able to survive on one income. That is not the way it is done any more. Many women took time out from the workforce to raise their families and then returned to work. These reforms, to use the polite term, will impact on those folks significantly and most unfairly.
An anomaly was pointed out to me by a lawyer in the Moose Jaw area concerned about couples who separated or divorced prior to 1978. As I was advised, after 1978 pensions were split equitably between the male and the female of a dissolved marriage but before then there was no retroactivity. Women who are reaching their retirement years are suddenly learning to their shock and chagrin that the money they thought they were entitled to is in fact not there. This is another area that could have been fixed during the CPP review but such was not the case.
Living conditions have improved significantly for seniors in the not too distant past for many different reasons. We certainly welcome that and want to see those living conditions continue to improve.
Child poverty groups which are concerned about the elimination of that unfortunate social condition have noted that seniors' conditions have benefited in the past. I think that this bill will show quite quickly that these benefits are not going to continue for very long. It is an unfortunate program and it will not enhance the living conditions of our seniors who deserve a lot better.
I will conclude my remarks by remembering the work done on social programs by the father of the current Minister of Finance. Paul Martin Sr. worked with folks like the late Stanley Knowles, Tommy Douglas and others to improve the retirement benefits so that our seniors who had worked hard all their lives for this country could retire with a degree of comfort, security and dignity. I believe that he would be appalled at what is being brought forth by the current Liberal government.