Mr. Speaker, I will begin by saying that I do not think there is ever a good time or comfortable time in which to deal with the kind of legislation we are dealing with this afternoon.
I have had the opportunity to be here for a number of years and I have seen these kinds of issues dealt with before. I know some of the pitfalls that present themselves to members of parliament on the occasion of this kind of legislation.
Surely it is an opportunity for us to be overly critical of each other. It is an opportunity for the public to be overly critical of us. It is an opportunity for various forms of temptation, various forms of self-righteousness and grandstanding of one kind or another.
We all need to resist the temptation for the sake of parliament, for the sake of our relationships with each other and for the sake of not bringing into disrepute the reputation of this place or of members of parliament.
It is also an opportunity for people to misrepresent, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally, what is going on when we come to these kinds of deliberations.
Some of my colleagues in the Reform Party have experienced that over the last while. As we have come to this point in time many unfair things have been said about them and many things have been alleged about them in the media. I say welcome to the club. I have had all kinds of things alleged about me over the years with respect to this issue that have been very unfair, as have members of parliament in general.
I can only think of the way in which it is often said that members of parliament after only six years are entitled to a full pension. Not so. After six years we are only entitled to six-fifteenths times 75% of the average of the best five years. I agree that is a pension, but oftentimes if we look in the media we get the impression that members get a full pension when they leave after six years. I do not know how many times I have had to correct that perception about the MP pension plan.
Another perception is the tendency on the part of those who are critical of the plan to add up everything a member would receive from now, at whatever particular age, to age 75 and give the impression that somehow an MP would receive this in the form of one lump sum or one cheque upon leaving the House of Commons instead of annual instalments of about $48,000 in the case of a full pension to age 75 and beyond if the member lives beyond 75.
Sometimes there is a great deal of manipulation of facts to create an impression that is much more negative than the actual facts demand. If people want to be critics of the current pension, I would submit that there are things to be said about it which are true. I am only objecting to the things that are said about it which are untrue.
Some of my colleagues have had the experience of seeing how easily this sort of thing is picked up and run with on the part of people whose only agenda, it seems, is to make members of parliament or politicians look bad.
There is no good time to do this. On the other hand, given the way the system works now, there is no other way to do it except for members of parliament to deal with it themselves.
That brings me to the question of process. The NDP has advocated in the House for years and years that this process be taken out of the hands of members of parliament. The Reform Party House leader said this in his speech. I want him to know that we have been saying this for a long time. We agree but it has not been done.
Until it is done we will be in the dilemma in which we find ourselves today. Either nothing will be done or we will do things that need to be done. Some of us will agree with some of it and others will disagree with some of it, but all of us will feel a bit uncomfortable. I think we should be lifted out of this situation.
It is not enough to have statutory reviews of MPs pay and benefits after every election. That is not an independent review. I am not saying the members who were appointed were not independent minded, but it is within the political class that it is done.
Former members of parliament are appointed to review the pay of members of parliament. I do not think that goes far enough in terms of establishing both independence and some form of binding recommendations that could come forward from the independent commission that would be set up if the NDP were to have its way.
Why? We can set up all the independent commissions we like, but if in the end members of parliament have to decide to implement or not to implement the independently arrived at recommendations we are right back to where we started from.
What has often happened in the past when people have looked at MPs' pay and benefits is that they come back with a recommendation that we be paid a heck of a lot more than we are being paid. Then members of parliament have to say, because of the sensitivity of the matter, we cannot accept that recommendation and we are right back to where we started from.
If we are to have some kind of independent review and recommendation we need to have what goes with it, a mechanism for automatic legislation or implementation of those recommendations without it having to come to the floor of the House of Commons and without our being put in the position that we are in today and every other day that we have to deal with this kind of legislation. That has been the longstanding recommendation of the New Democratic Party.
With respect to the details of what we have before us, we are not one of those parties which has members who have opted out of the pension plan. Therefore we have no self-interest either individually or collectively in either the opting in provision or in the supplementary severance. We support this because we see it as an opportunity to address the situation that some of the members who have opted out of the plan find themselves in, a situation which they can either address through accessing the supplementary severance or, if they so choose, opting back into the plan. That is up to individual members and we leave it at that. It did not affect any of our members in any way whatsoever.
The opposition House leader kept referring to the three parties that had opted out of the plan. I do not think that is quite an accurate way to describe it. No parties opted out of the plan. Every party in the House has people in the plan and three parties in the House have individual members outside the plan. The Reform Party has more than any other party. The Liberals and the Bloc have a few. It is not really a question of parties; it is a question of individuals in parties.
I would like to indicate what we are not saying when we indicate our concern about the raise. I would be moved to defend the raise against certain kinds of criticisms. I have been here before when I once opposed a raise. I found myself eventually defending it because I was offended by the kinds of criticisms offered about parliament, about members of parliament and about my colleagues who had supported the raise.
I found myself at that time ending up defending the raise because of the unreasonable and vicious kinds of things that were said about members of parliament who decided they needed a raise after a long period of time in which there had been none, the situation we find ourselves in today.
I want to make clear that our concern about the raise had more to do with timing than with substance. We felt, and I think this was reflected to some degree in the Blais report, that if we were to get a raise of 2% we would have preferred that it happen after everyone else in the public sector had received a raise in that range.
That is not an option that is before us today. We have before us the option of dealing with the legislation today. We do not choose when these things will be dealt with. However that was one of the concerns we had and we do have a reasonable hope that others in the public sector, as the government House leader said, will get a raise in that range.
In any event, these are some of the things I wanted to put on the record. We think it should be dealt with in an independent and binding way.
We regret that is somehow not able to happen, but it is certainly something that we will continue to work for in this parliament and in subsequent parliaments.