Mr. Speaker, I will answer the hon. member's points by making three of my own. First, in not using all the time allocated to me, I am of the belief that if you want to practice economy in government it starts with economy of speech.
Second, I found the member's comments interesting because they illustrate the last point I was trying to make. The member obviously sees no connection between getting the moral authority from people to reform pensions and the fact that the government lost that moral authority when it gave its party the MP pension. The very fact that the member sees no connection between that issue and the MP pension precisely illustrates the blind spot of the government.
With respect to his substantive point, Reform has gone through the proposals that the minister and the provinces agreed to with respect to the reform of CPP. It is our conviction that the CPP cannot be fixed simply by working on it. We have to look more broadly at all the contributing factors to retirement income. That is why our proposal includes the following elements which I will take just a couple of minutes to explain.
First, a guarantee that existing seniors, every Canadian aged 60 and above, will receive all the benefits promised to them by CPP.
Second, a proposal to shift younger Canadians on to an expanded RRSP system, mandatory, tax sheltered retirement savings accounts like RRSPs and these deliver, of course, greater pension benefits per dollar invested than anything that has ever been proposed for CPP.
Third, for older workers not young enough to accumulate an adequate retirement income by expanded RRSPs alone, we propose a transition combination of CPP and expanded RRSPs to ensure pension benefits at least on a par with CPP if not better.
Finally, through our fresh start tax relief proposals, we propose to lift 1.2 million Canadians, including 300,000 seniors, off the federal income tax rolls altogether, thus improving their retirement income.
If one takes the collection of those things, the modified CPP, the expanded RRSPs and the tax relief afforded to seniors, our argument is that the package delivers greater retirement income per dollar than anything we have seen from the finance minister or from the government.