Mr. Speaker, thank you for that ruling.
I have said from day one that Bill C-78 is an extremely complicated bill that has profound and precedent setting public policy implications. The debate we have heard in the last hour and the amendments we have been debating point out that this bill is not only about the pension plan or the new public sector pension investment board, it goes far beyond that. The government, in a cynical way I would argue, has tried to introduce the concept of same sex spousal benefits. That is something I am personally in favour of and have lobbied long and hard for, but the government slipped it in with another package which makes it very difficult for people who are interested in both issues. They are finding a bit of a contradiction in terms of being able to support the bill.
One member of our caucus has dedicated half of his life to fight for same sex benefits and all of those rights and he is being put in the uncomfortable position of having to vote against this bill because he is so obviously against the financial aspects of it.
Some of the debate we have heard dealing with the group 2 amendments mystifies me because we are hearing from a group of people who seem to feel somehow that by giving rights to one group of people that will diminish their rights, as if rights were a finite pie and if one group has too many they are going to have to take less. I disagree with that point of view. It has always been my position that if we give full rights to everyone, all of our rights are enhanced, not diminished.
I am very concerned that many of the amendments in group 2 find their origins in some not too thinly veiled homophobia. I am not comfortable at all with some of the things that we have heard in this room today. I wish people would take a more generous point of view.
However, some of the issues that were raised are quite legitimate. Using the word conjugal as the test for cohabitation, or whether one will be able to give survivor's benefits to another person, has to be looked at a lot more seriously. We will not have time to do that. I will have three or four minutes to speak about it and then I presume the House leader on the other side will come rushing in to move closure on the debate and the whole thing will be put to bed, if you will excuse the pun.
I do not think conjugal is any kind of a test. There are other living arrangements that come up from time to time when people cohabit and do not have a conjugal relationship and we should be able to assign survivor's benefits to that partner as well, whether it is to a brother or a sister who might share the same home and so on. There are many aspects to it that we need to investigate. Again it is sad that we will not have time to debate properly this important, precedent setting public policy issue.
Had the government come in through the front door, honestly, with a bill dealing with the thorny issue which has been surfacing year after year of same sex benefits, we could have had an honest debate and really dealt with it in the way that it deserves to be dealt with.
I spoke about seniors groups. One of the groups that was most disappointed about closure and not having an opportunity to deal with this at committee properly was the largest group of retirees and senior citizens involved with the public sector, the federal superannuates national association.
That group was notified the night before the committee hearing. It represents hundreds of thousands of superannuates. The night before it was to appear it was given the 200 page tome. Even the clerk of the committee, when he gave me my copy of Bill C-78, said it was weighty tome. Those were the terms he used. We could hardly lift it. It is the size of the Manhattan phone book. Those people had 12 hours to prepare their remarks on behalf of all of the people they represent.
The parliamentary secretary thinks there was adequate time. The whole committee, on the Liberal side at least, made it clear that they did not really need to hear a lot of witnesses; two or three unions maybe, two or three actuaries and a couple of people involved in public sector pension plans would be adequate for this huge, precedent setting piece of legislation. I cannot say strongly enough how much I disagree.
We did not get a chance to go into some of the jurisprudence involved with public sector pension plans which are silent on the issue of what to do with a surplus. We never got a chance to wrestle with that issue or even to look at recent cases.
One example comes to mind, that being when Ontario Hydro wanted to take a contribution holiday because it had a surplus and CUPE, the union representing the workers, to its credit, took Ontario Hydro to court. The courts backed up the union's position that the employer did not have an exclusive right to the surplus of the plan, even it is a defined benefit plan. The money, in this case, was split evenly. The employer received some money and some of the money went to increase benefits. That kind of an equitable settlement, whether by arbitration or by some court ruling, is something that would have satisfied the people involved in this case.
One of the amendments that has been put forward argues quite capably that the government should live up to its own legislation, which would be the federal Pension Benefits Standards Act. Under that act any plans operating under federal jurisdiction would require two-thirds of the members of the plan to vote in favour of using any of the pension surplus for anything at all. The government's own bill, which recently received royal assent in 1998, calls for the beneficiaries of the plan to have a say in the allocation of any surplus. I would hope that at least that amendment would carry when this comes to a vote.
We will not have enough time to adequately go through the many, many issues in this complex piece of legislation because the government will move closure again. It is a disservice to all the people who are involved in the plan and all the survivors who collect benefits.