Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to thank the hon. member for Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques for his question, which is a good question, an honest question. In fact, I asked myself the same question, I talked about it with colleagues, and this is what I can tell him.
First of all, amending the Canada pension plan legislation requires the approval of a number of provincial governments. You are no doubt aware that this, fortunately, cannot be done unilaterally by the federal government. It requires the agreement of two-thirds of the provinces representing at least two-thirds of the Canadian population, which explains why the federal government has limited scope for action in making such amendments.
We discussed such changes with the provincial governments as openly as we could. I must admit to the member today that we did not succeed in convincing them of the need we saw to bring about a number of changes.
However, and I want to add this so that it is clear to him and also because the other members will be interested to know this, they were determined to stop going around in circles. How could they break this logjam? Since they could not arrive at an agreement, they included in the last series of statutory amendments a clause providing for an automatic increase in contributions, so that the provincial governments were faced with an alternative that was even less attractive than a potential agreement. And then there was a change of government.
What I am telling my colleague for Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques is that, if there is an agreement today, it will be due in large part to the fact that, as we expected a deadlock, we included in the bill a provision for a mechanism that was going to force the parties—