Madam Speaker, it is of course with pleasure that I rise this noon hour to speak to Bill C-78, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board Act.
I should point out that three categories of public service of Canada employees are affected by this bill. There are the employees of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian armed forces and the enormous public service, spread from one end of the country to the other.
The Bloc Quebecois, naturally, will be opposing Bill C-78, unless the government agrees to the amendments it proposes. As I have few illusions, I can tell you we will be opposing this bill.
First, we in the Bloc have moved amendments to clauses 90, 145 and 192 in order to establish a management board that would report to the House annually. The President of the Treasury Board had established an advisory committee, which, in December 1996, in fact recommended to the President of the Treasury Board the establishment of a management board.
One would not give the job of managing blood to Dracula. One should not give responsibility for the $30 billion to the President of the Treasury Board. This is the worst mistake the Parliament of Canada could make.
The management board could properly manage the accumulated surpluses. It could establish contributions. And the reason there are these huge surpluses is that premiums are too high. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure this out.
The board of directors could also manage the surpluses, and deficits if any. In the event of deficits, premiums would be increased. This is always part of negotiations.
The valiant Liberal member who spoke before me has never belonged to a union. He has never needed to negotiate his salary and working conditions. When the employer says that he has 10% for increases and is going to put them only toward salaries, this will not include holidays, benefits or pension contributions. As a general rule, contributions to the pension fund are on a fifty-fifty basis. The good member opposite should know that.
So, if there are surpluses of $30.1 billion, it is because employees and the government put in too much. However, if the fund is well run, $30.1 billion at 10%—and I think that just about any manager can easily get more than 10% interest on such an imposing amount—would yield annual returns of $3 billion, while the federal government is now paying out $3.1 billion to retirees and surviving spouses. So the fund shrinks by only $100 million a year. As well, the workers in the three groups I mentioned earlier generate $1.8 billion annually, enriching the fund by $1.7 billion each year.
We find two things particularly maddening. The first is that the government is using its majority to gag the opposition, by allowing only four hours of debate on a bill over 200 pages thick, a bill that will allow the President of the Treasury Board to appropriate $30 billion. This is $30,000 million. It is a huge amount of money.
We saw what this government did with the unemployed and the poor. It took the surplus in the employment insurance fund, $21 billion, and of course used some of it to reduce the debt, but also to intrude into provincial jurisdictions, including with the millennium scholarships.
This government is warped and mean, and it is about to plunder the surpluses in its employees pension funds.
These surpluses were largely accumulated with the employees' contributions, as I will illustrate in detail. There is a surplus of $14.9 billion in the public service pension fund; another of $2.4 billion in the RCMP fund—there are not as many participants—and another of $12.9 billion in the Canadian forces pension fund. When we add up these three amounts, we get a total surplus of $30.2 billion.
Ministers in this good Liberal government, with the complicity of its backbenchers, will rise this evening and say “Yes, we agree to gouge public service workers, RCMP employees and Canadian forces members”.
These three groups currently include 275,000 participants. Some have retired, so that makes around 160,000. Then there are 52,000 surviving spouses as well.
With proper management, we could give workers several years' break from contributing. For most of them this would be a considerable break, amounting to over $1,000. The surpluses could finance the funds just from the revenue generated. If properly managed, they could earn well over 10%. This could go beyond the $3.1 billion monthly payments to retirees cost the fund.
Did the big cheese, the President of Treasury Board, the hon. member for Hull—Aylmer, consult the unions? No way. Were there any negotiations with anyone? No way. He has shown no respect for the committee he himself struck, by not paying attention to a single one of its recommendations. This is another disguised theft the Liberal government is preparing to commit.
Yesterday I got an e-mail from Jean Morin, a young man from my riding, from Thetford Mines to be exact. He asked me to speak out in the House against the flaw in the employment insurance system, which counts short weeks, when he works just a few hours in a week, in order to do the calculations for his last 26 weeks. He described this as robbery, as abuse.
These robberies are not being committed against the rich, people like the Minister of Finance, but against the poor, because there are greater numbers of them and they are often defenceless.
I am therefore asking the member across the way to stand up and vote against Bill C-78.