Mr. Speaker, I sense this will be the last opportunity I will have to talk to Bill C-78 or any amendments to it. Even though four groups of amendments were taken from the many that were put forward, we have reason to believe that some time during the day today the government will again move closure on debate and shut down the opportunity for us to talk to the 30, 40 or 50 amendments which really need to be debated. It is a pattern that has developed right from day one of the debate on Bill C-78. We have every reason to believe, given the history and the pattern, that it will happen again today.
I will take this opportunity to say a few words in the short period of time I have on some of the many amendments which our party put forward to try to clean up what we feel is a very flawed bill. I am tempted to say it is a flawed bill, but it is not a flawed bill. In a way it is a masterful piece of work. It is a true piece of art in the way it was put together so the government could achieve what it set out to achieve. It will take the $30 billion surplus from retirees, pensioners and beneficiaries of the pension plans and use it for whatever purposes it sees fit.
I want to condemn the government in the strongest possible language I am allowed to use. Unfortunately I am limited in what things I can say about the bill. There are many things I could say about it. I cannot use the word theft. I do not intend to try the Speaker's patience by using the word theft, stealing, highway robbery or any of the other words that come to mind. I will not say those things because I know I am not supposed to do so.
I guess I would have to ask the Chair if I could use the word excrement. Is the word excrement allowed in the House of Commons? That is one word which certainly comes to mind. I do not believe it is in the book. If members worked in a circus and it was their job to follow the elephants in a parade, the stuff they would be sweeping up would pretty well typify or exemplify what we are dealing with today. The word travesty was used earlier and I am not going to repeat it over and over again.
There are not many Liberals here today to listen to these final words of debate on Bill C-78. I do not blame them for not being here, although I have some admiration for the Liberals who hang around to listen to this kind of thing. It must be hard not to get jaded about the whole political and parliamentary process when Liberal backbenchers are used as nothing more than a focus group for cabinet when it wants to ram something through.
It is going to be those members sitting here today listening to this who will have to go back to their ridings to justify, defend and explain that the senior citizens are going to have their pockets picked to the tune of $30 billion. I admire those who have the courage to come here and face the music. I wish them well when they go back to their ridings.
Opposition to this bill is building up steam as we speak. Right across the country seniors are rallying. They are getting together to study this bill, and it takes a long time to digest a bill of this size.
That is exactly what the government is trying to avoid because it saw what happened when it tried to tamper with the OAS and the GIS and when it tried to create the new seniors benefit. That committee toured the country and seniors had a chance to look at it in some detail. Seniors had a chance to mobilize, to voice their opinions and to tell the government that they did not want a new seniors benefit which actually resulted in less benefit for them. They did not want the GIS and the OAS to be merged into one so-called seniors benefit. That is exactly what is happening with this bill. The government has to stop it in its tracks because there is too much opposition right across the country.
The largest single group of beneficiaries, the federal superannuates national association, had 12 hours to prepare. Representatives were called the night before to make a presentation to the committee the next morning. They complained vigorously that they did not have a chance to prepare a proper presentation. They did not even have a chance to read the 200 pages of text that makes up Bill C-78. Seniors now, because they pay attention to the news and read the papers, are a very well informed group of voters and they are catching on in large numbers.
Like every good son, I had brunch with my mother on Sunday. She collects a pension through the public service pension plan. It was a very nice brunch. She collects the survivor's benefit because my father worked in the public sector all of his life and she survives on the meagre survivor's benefit that she gets. She lives in the same little wartime house at 998 Warsaw that I grew up in. Betty Martin, who is 82 years old and lives in Winnipeg, asked me at brunch, unprompted I might add, “Are they going to take away my pension?”
I had to answer, to be fair, that nothing was going to happen to the pension she is currently collecting. However, I told her that the $30 billion surplus would be taken out of the fund. Her question was “Is that not part of our pension?” That is an innocent question which came right out of the blue. An 82 year old woman saw immediately what was happening. Without reading the text she knew that it was fundamentally wrong to take $30 billion out of the pension fund which could have gone to improve the benefits of pensioners and retirees.
This whole thing got off to a bad start because of one statement made by the chief human resources officer of the Treasury Board Secretariat in June 1998. I will quote Mr. Alain Jolicoeur because I want to get this right. He made one statement that started the ball rolling on this whole atrocity. He said “Employees and retirees have no proprietary interest to the surplus in the superannuation plan”. He defied all conventional wisdom on employee benefit plans by saying “The surplus is not yours. You get your benefits, but the surplus is not yours”.
It is a basic tenet of anybody who is involved with employee benefit plans that any surplus is deferred wages. It is part of the pay package. It is money being held in trust to improve the benefits of the beneficiaries of the plan. That is where we got off to a bad start.
The President of the Treasury Board made it worse when he came out publicly and said even more strongly “There is no chance in hell that the union can claim a $30 billion surplus”.
First of all, he is wrong. It is not the union that is trying to claim the money. None of that money would go to the union. The union is arguing that it should go to the beneficiaries. His quote was “They do not have a chance in hell of getting their hands on it”. The government had made up its mind in a cold and callous way. It had targeted that money and then it set about taking very logical steps to take it.
This is a pattern we have seen before. The government took $25 billion from the EI surplus, which was taken from the most vulnerable people in society, the unemployed. Now it is taking money away from arguably the next most vulnerable bunch of people in society, the retirees, senior citizens, pensioners, beneficiaries of the pension plan, many of whom live in poverty.
We should not let anybody tell us that this is some kind of Cadillac pension we are dealing with. A disproportionate number of retirees are female. The average woman, with 20 years of service in the federal public service, is receiving a pension of approximately $9,000 a year. This is not a Cadillac pension. Nobody is living in luxury as a result of it.
If that $30 billion were divided up among the beneficiaries it would result in about $30,000 per beneficiary. Spread out over the period of their retirement it might mean $2,000 or $3,000 a year per beneficiary. Again, $9,000 to $11,000 or $12,000 is not a huge amount of dough.
I will not get a chance to speak to many of the motions which I put forward, but obviously we have put forward amendments to this bill that would take away the enabling language that was cleverly put in to allow the government to take not only this $30 billion surplus, but all other surpluses; all future surpluses which will be invested by the public sector pension investment board.
At the very least, one of the amendments that we put forward dealt with that board and the pension investment policies that it might be bound to or that might be stipulated. The legislation is really silent on that. The only goal would be to produce the maximum profit. Obviously that has to be the first goal of any trustees of a pension plan.
We would argue that there should be some ethical investment policies as well. For instance, the government should not invest in any company that might be engaged in a service that is contracted out which would cost public service members their jobs. What if it were a janitorial company that was bidding on a contract to clean the House of Commons? The people who traditionally do those jobs would be laid off and replaced with people from a company in which their pension plan is invested. That would be fundamentally wrong. I think the beneficiaries would want to speak out against that. They will not get a chance to speak out against it now. That is just one example of how many things need to be discussed and we will not get a chance to discuss them. It is deplorable. It is excrement.