I do not need the help of the hon. member. He should just let me talk. It was employed for partisan purposes and often in ways that I found quite unacceptable.
I was one of the people who was targeted in the literature of the Reform Party. I remember seeing my name in pamphlets as someone who was receiving a $1 million pension because I had the good fortune, or misfortune some might say, to be elected when I was 27 years old. They calculated everything I would receive from that year on and, because I was so much younger, there would be that much more distance between my age and when I was 75. It would all be added together, figured out through some kind of formula about indexing that would kick in when I was 60 and amount to this enormous sum. That was the sum put beside my name.
My children would come home from school and ask “Daddy, are we millionaires?” I asked them what they were talking about and they said “The kids at school are saying that you are a millionaire. They are saying that you get a million dollars. How come we don't see any signs of it?” It is hurtful to have those kinds of impressions left and to have those kinds of questions asked, yet that is the kind of thing that not just myself but others had to put up with.
I would certainly beg the indulgence of the House if hon. members can detect the difficulty I have in speaking to this issue. I do not mean this in an entirely partisan way, but I also have some satisfaction in speaking to this issue because I hope this legislation could bring to an end what I regard to be a very ugly chapter in Canadian politics. Members of parliament were played off against each other and this began to happen even within the parties that started it. I think this was the beginning of wisdom which led to this day and the legislation we now have before us.
All members of parliament will be in the plan, as it should be with pension plans generally speaking. No one will be able to exercise any kind of self-righteousness with respect to the other whether in the collective sense of one political party over another or in the individual sense of one MP over another. There is some room left for that in the way this works out because of the buyback provisions, et cetera.
I would echo the sentiments of the government House leader in hoping that it will not become the object of that sort of thing but that this will be something people will be left to decide individually, that their decisions will be respected but not regarded as cannon fodder for political rhetoric.
The opposition House leader verged on this. Perhaps this is what he meant to say when he said that this is no secret and there has been talk around the Hill. There has not just been talk around the Hill. There has been talk between the House leaders. What we have before us tonight is something that was negotiated. It is a product of cross-party or inter-party negotiation, whatever is the appropriate word. I have heard it said and some reporters even asked me today “Don't you think the government House leader has tried to outmanoeuvre Canadian Alliance members, former Reform Party members or what have you?” I said “No, that is not what is going on here”.
The first thing that had to be done out of fairness to all members who found themselves in the anomalous position that was created by the Reform of 1995 was to address the particular anomaly, something that was not noticed at the time. That had to be done anyway, but there was the second dimension of whether or not one more opportunity would be provided for members who had opted out of the plan in response to what I consider as the Prime Minister's bluff in 1995, but in some respects a bluff that was called by those members who opted out. Perhaps they were not sure who bluffed whom after it was over.
There was a need to give those members, a felt need, not on the part of other members but a debate in the minds of those of us who had been the object of this political strategy to ask why should we. Why should we allow them back in after all they said about the plan even after it was amended? There was a felt need to do that, particularly on the part of many members who had opted out, and that was made clear.
The end result was that the legislation reflects the fact that it is better for everyone, and particularly for those parties who have opted out members because we do not have any, if everyone went back in together rather than being vulnerable to the kind of not necessarily public political sniping that might go on but even the internal political sniping that might go on. What we have before us is an amendment that puts everybody into the plan and gives those who are able and willing an opportunity to buy back.
One could be tempted to say many other things. It is part of a process that we have seen on the part of my colleagues to the left, who came to this House without any institutional memory by definition. It was not their fault. They just did not have one. Therefore, they did not always understand the reason why certain things are the way they are.
This is a profoundly conservative argument I am going to make, but sometimes when we find things the way they are, sometimes there is a reason for it and it takes a number of years to find out or to appreciate why things are the way they are.
We have seen a lot of changes. The leader does not sit in the second row any more. They have critics. They do not belong to pods, or whatever it was that they belonged to when they first got here.