Mr. Speaker, I rise today to try to persuade all members present that we should give careful consideration to what we are doing here today. I could say I am standing here as part of the body of sober second thought. Usually that terminology is applied to the Senate but since the bill started in the Senate and has already been passed by the Senate, its sober second thought has become the first thought, and so here we are giving it sober second thought in this Chamber.
The unelected Senate has done another wonderful thing for us. It has now reversed the roles of the House of Commons and its own august chamber. I object to that. I am sure thousands and maybe millions of Canadians do. It is time we straightened that Senate up.
I might not object if the senators had been elected, if the people would have had a voice to say which one gets in there. Instead the prime minister of the day appoints whoever happens to have the best party credentials. Then that person becomes a senator. The other thing that is so unconscionable about that is that senator never has to go back to the people nor to the prime minister to be accountable. We saw that recently. The prime minister who has the right to appoint senators has no right to right to dis-appoint them. I use that term advisedly. Even the prime minister who appoints them cannot hold them accountable.
There is a large flaw in a democratic system when we break that circle of accountability. In a circle everyone is accountable to the person either in front or behind them. That is what happens in a democracy. As a member of Parliament I am responsible to the people in my riding. In return, those people are responsible to correctly choose and direct their member of Parliament so we get good laws in this country. The citizens are in that circle of responsibility.
It is unfortunate when the prime minister appoints a Senate and the Senate ends up initiating laws like this because the circle of accountability is broken. We should not be surprised when that happens, that we have laws that are not as good as they could be.
I will talk about the amendments to the Pension Benefits Standards Act, the bill we are debating today.
I have a little problem suppressing my cynicism. What we have here is a government that is proposing to strengthen the role of the superintendent of pension administration. The superintendent is the person who oversees the building of pension funds in the public and private sectors across the country.
The federal government is appointing a superintendent to oversee pension funds, presumably providing protection for the pension funds of employees and employers but mostly on behalf of employees.
One needs to ask what kind of credentials the government can display. Since 1966 one of the largest pension funds in the country has been the Canada pension plan. It was started by the Liberals. Right from the beginning as data were gathered and statistical information became available it was underfunded. When the Conservatives were nine years in power they did not correct it. The Liberals have been in power for a number of years. That pension fund has been administered in such a way that its present unfunded liability is currently about equal to our national debt, both of which are shameful.
It is true that the national debt is a little bigger. We have about $580 billion of debt that we owe directly because government was borrowing. However, if one were to do the actuarial mathematical calculation to see what kind of money is now needed to fulfil all future obligations of the Canada pension plan, one would see the amount of shortfall is in the neighbourhood of $500 billion, an astronomical number. Yet the government starts a bill in the Senate that says we need a superintendent of pension funds.
I agree on behalf of employees that we need to have the assurance that when pension funds are contributed by employers and employees they are properly managed and properly invested. An accounting should be done. There should be proper security of those funds so that no one can abscond with the money. In the event that businesses run into hard times there need to be protections against those businesses reaching into their pension funds, which really belong to the employees, to try to bail themselves out. We need those regulations.
I agree but, as I said earlier, part of me has trouble suppressing my cynicism when the same government says that it should supervise pension funds so that everything goes well and it has such a terrible track record with its own pension fund, the Canada pension plan.
In this instance I think right now that I will support the measures being proposed in the bill. Of course I object that the bill did not start up here, but so be it.
Most of the measures in the bill are needed and I want to support it. I have a concern with sections of the act that state the superintendent, under the authority of the minister, has the powers to do these different things.
Some of the powers are very important. Anybody who reads the act will see that the superintendent, for example, has the right to demand that any new pension fund be registered with his office within 60 days. That is a perfectly fine and acceptable requirement.
This is a way of providing some assurance and some security for employees who are paying into the pension fund. It helps everybody involved in administering the fund to be accountable to someone. There we come back to the question of accountability again.
I have some real serious concerns on behalf of people who work all their lives. When they approach retirement age they suddenly find the things they were planning on have evaporated right under their noses.
I know of a family back in my riding where that happened. This man worked hard in a company for many years. He was about four or five years away from retirement age when the company, how do I put it politely, spun into the ground. It dug itself into a hole. The bosses decided they would try to do some interim financing by borrowing from the pension fund, which on the surface seemed okay at that time. It would have been okay if it would have been a temporary loan, if the company would have recovered and put the money back.
In this instance it became impossible for the company to do so. I am not even sure there was anything illegal about what it was doing at the time. I do not know those details. However it took the pension money to try to bail itself out. The company still went under. Now the employees, including the person I know who was five years away from retiring, suddenly lost their jobs because the company quit and their pension fund evaporated with it. Now he is dependent on Canada pension for which he is eligible. It is really a drastic situation when people who pay into these funds for years and years cannot trust them.
I guess the beginning and the end of what I was to say is included in these statements. We need to make sure as legislators that we implement rules and we set up regulations correctly. I am grateful that in the House of Commons we have the scrutiny of regulations committee. When the superintendent, under the authority of the minister, makes regulations that apply to the administration of pension funds, the regulations are subject to the scrutiny of the House committee. Hopefully that will give Canadians a little more security in the assurance that their pensions funds will be there for them.
I have problems with some of the powers being given to the superintendent. In some instances they seem to be arbitrary. I have additional anxiety about a superintendent being responsible only to the minister.
I can make an outrageous statement here and I am sure I will not hear a voice of protest from them. Ministers in the present government do not always answer questions in question period. When we ask a question about something usually we get a runaround. Usually we get some vicious attack on our party, even maybe saying that we are not being very nice to ask such a question instead of giving us the facts.
What we have here is a superintendent who is answerable to the minister, but who can ever force the minister to be answerable to anyone?
I would like to see a real demand for openness in pension funds. Some of that is included in the bill. It begins a process. Perhaps it does not go far enough, but it requires that the superintendent get information.
I would like to make sure that everyone with a vested interest in the pension fund, whether it is an individual employee or someone even more distantly interested in the pension fund because of administrative procedures and so on, should have access to the records and administrative procedures being used in the administration of the pension fund.
I conclude by simply saying that the administration of pension funds is most important. We are living in an age in which many of us live longer. I come from a family where people live terribly long. I do not know whether I will keep up the family tradition but I expect to do so. That is true for many of us.
I remember as a young man at university studying mathematics, statistics, actuarial tables and things like that. Back then the actuarial tables we used had a life expectancy for a Canadian male of around 62 years. Now that dates me because those are very old tables. The life expectancy for males in Canada is approaching 80 years and for females it is even higher.
We now live longer in that period of time in our lives when we usually do not have jobs. We have retired and are depending on our retirement income. It is incumbent on the government to do what it needs to do so that there is openness and accountability. Pension funds need to be well administered. People need to have confidence in them. They need the government to actually deliver the funds that are expected when they retire.