Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have a chance to join in the last dwindling minutes of the debate on Bill C-78.
As those in the House realize, in the last hour we have seen closure moved yet again. We are not going to have an opportunity to go into the bill in nearly the depth that it certainly warrants. This is getting to be a real pattern. We have heard speaker after speaker comment on the fact that it is getting to be far too easy for the government to use closure and time allocation. They used to be very rare occurrences, but they are being used more and more frequently. Every time it meets the Liberals' expedient needs they have no qualms whatsoever about doing this.
This whole bill had its origins in a failure of the government to be able to negotiate a settlement with the unions and with the bargaining agents who have control over the pension plans. Now it is failing to use the democratic process to achieve its means.
I have always been of the mind that if your ideas have merit, they should be able to stand up to fair and honest debate and you will win the arguments. If the ideas come from a point of view that has more merits than the other arguments, then what would you be afraid of? The only time you should run from a free and open debate is when you know there is not a great deal of substance on your side of the argument. Then you have to take actions which I consider to be cowardly and circumvent the democratic process.
We are dealing with the amendments in Group No. 3. We have spoken to Group Nos. 1 and 2. Group No. 3 gets into some of the minutiae and detail dealing with the governance of this new public sector pension investment fund. This in itself could take up months and months of debate because a lot of things have been left unresolved in the bill as it stands.
We are going to have a 12 person board governing hundreds of billions of dollars of investment being openly invested in the free market. We have not really scratched the surface as to what impact that is going to have on the financial community.
Where are we going to invest this money? What kind of brokerage fees are we going to pay? What are the brokerage fees on a $100 billion being invested and reinvested every day? I have heard estimates that it might be $500 million to $700 million a year in brokerage fees.
What firm are we going to use to convey these transactions? What is the risk or the possibility of conflict of interest if we are going to be wielding that kind of clout financially? If there are 12 people on this board who is to say they do not have some remote relationship with one investment firm or another? Do they sit on another board of directors as well as the public sector pension investment fund? The conflict of interest possibilities are enormous. We should have dealt with that at great length and very carefully before we jumped into this whole idea.
We will be voting in favour of Motion No. 16 which was put forward by the Reform Party. It deals with the fact that the minister under this bill has enormous powers moved into his camp, things that used to be resolved in the House of Commons. The minister can now arbitrarily make changes to the rates of contribution to the pension fund. This is something that the House of Commons used to do. It used to have to be tabled here and be debated here.
It is also a breach of trust. I do not think it is unparliamentary to say it is a breach of trust. There has been a longstanding pact between the bargaining agents for the public sector unions and the government that if they took pensions off the bargaining table at negotiating time, the trade-off would be that they would never ever unilaterally alter the terms and conditions of the plan without bringing it to the House and without debate, et cetera.
The Liberals said they would not do it. That hearkens back to the early 1960s and Walter Gordon, and maybe the current Prime Minister was part of that caucus. Those are the people who made the deal back then. There is a historical record with this labour pact that this would not happen.
Now they are instituting the very thing they promised they would never do. They are incorporating it into Bill C-78. The minister will unilaterally and arbitrarily alter the terms and conditions of the public sector pension plan because it is given that that right will in fact be his under this bill. Motion No. 16 seeks to remedy this one flaw of the many flaws in Bill C-78.
We cannot talk about this bill without talking about the public sector in general. We all know this bill will take the $30 billion surplus and all future surpluses out of the public sector pension plans. I have said this before, but to deduct something from a person's paycheque for a specific purpose and then to use it for something entirely different is at best a breach of trust. I could go further with the worst case but I will not say what it could be if I really took it to its logical conclusion.
What will the impact be on the public sector when it finally sinks in? In the fullness of time when seniors, pensioners and retirees have had a chance to look through Bill C-78, these 200 pages of verbiage, what will the effect be on the public sector and the people paying into the plan? It will be another dent in the morale of the public sector.
Productivity is the big buzzword these days. The Minister of Finance, the Minister of Human Resources Development, the Minister of Industry, all they want to talk about is the productivity in the workforce. I can tell the House something about productivity and morale in the public sector.
Public servants have had blow after blow after blow to their morale and I would argue to their productivity or their ability to function. It used to be that if people took a job in the public sector they would probably take less money than in the private sector, but they could feel good about a couple of things.
They had a pretty good idea that some job security was associated with it. They probably had some comfort there. That went out the window when the government started cutting, hacking and slashing the public sector. There were 50,000 employees out on the street with no job security anymore. That protective umbrella is a thing of the past. They did not have the job security but they were making an okay wage. Then there were six years of wage freezes. Six years without a wage increase and they fell way behind the private sector. If they started out on par, they fell way behind.
There are 50,000 fewer people to do the same amount of work. The work does not go away. They are working harder and their wages are frozen. They can barely function because the government has taken out that whole middle band of skilled people, but they can still take some comfort in the fact that they have a pretty good pension. That gets used against them at the bargaining table. The employer says, “Yes we are paying you less money, but you have this great pension”. Now for the unkindest cut of all, the government is going after that too.
What else is there to feel good about working in the public sector with all these things being chipped away bit by bit until now when morale has never been lower, when any kind of pact that might have existed in the post-war years between labour and management is gone? It is eradicated. The deal has been broken. It has been violated. I would argue that we are looking at real chronic long term problems in the public sector and this is one more example.
I want to come back to the idea of the motions in Group No. 3 of dealing with this massive fund, the public sector pension investment fund. That is a lot of power, $100 billion. Twelve individuals from all walks of life, ordinary Canadians will be the trustees of this enormous fund.
There will be no joint labour-management trusteeship as with most pension funds I have had any dealings with. Most employee benefit plans have some kind of joint labour-management trusteeship. Then at least the employees or the beneficiaries of the plan have some say in how these things are invested and directed. This bill calls for none of that and there is no opportunity for them to take part in the governance of the plan.
There are no stipulations about what kind of investments will be acceptable. We are arguing through some of our amendments that it should be an ethical investment fund at the very least. We do not need to take less money to have an ethical investment fund. Frankly the ethical investment plans in the private sector are doing as well or better than the conventional financial instruments.
We had a couple of stipulations. We wanted to make sure that no investments made by this fund would be involved in any environmental degradation. I think that is pretty safe. Most Canadians would not want their pension plan polluting Lake Ontario.
We do not want the pension plan investing in any industry that uses child labour or follows labour laws that are substandard or do not match Canadian standards. Most Canadians would agree with that. No Canadian has any appetite for the economic exploitation of children. Why do we not have an ethical plan that stipulates these things? What about tobacco? Do we want a pension fund that invests in tobacco and is pushing smoking on our kids? No.
The plan falls short in any stipulation of ethical investments. Many of the motions in Group No. 3 are very valuable and we look forward to voting on them later.