Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to address Bill C-28 today. I want to compliment my friend from Portage—Lisgar for his excellent speech and the excellent points he made respecting the bill.
I have to say that I am just as frustrated as he is with Bill C-28. The reason I am frustrated is that while there are some good things in it, very obviously the government has attempted to politicize this issue. I am in politics and I understand the temptation to do that, but why do we have to do that on everything?
This was an opportunity for the government to use the independent panel to establish remuneration for members of parliament and in doing that really set a precedent whereby MPs could vote for the recommendations or vote against them based upon what the independent third party had done. Instead the government felt it had to meddle in this, to politicize the whole process and poison it in doing so. I will get back to that in a moment.
Let me talk about some of the things that are in the bill. First of all the Canadian Alliance has taken a number of positions on and has policy with respect to MP remuneration. We have said in article 70 of our principles that we believe MP remuneration should be set by an independent third party. Substantially that is what we have with this commission. We have no problem with that.
Second, we have said that the remuneration should come into effect after the next election, for obvious reasons. If the public is dissatisfied with this issue, with the package that has been proposed, it can be an election issue. MPs will not be in the position where they directly implement a pay increase that affects them, because of course their fate as members of parliament will not be known until after the next election. We believe in that very strongly. The government had the opportunity to put that in the legislation and did not do so.
Second, we have said that we believe in converting the tax free expense allowance into salary that is taxable. The commission recommended that and it is in the bill. We agree with that.
We believe, and we have said in the past, that the accrual rate for the MP pension should be reduced and brought in line with the private sector. To a substantial degree, but not completely, the commission did that when it recommended an accrual rate of 2.5%. For reasons that are not clear to me, the government moved it up to 3%.
The House leader from the government side is here and he says it did not do that. He is technically correct. What the government said was that it should produce the same result as the previous pension plan. We had a 4% accrual rate on a much lower salary. Now we have a much higher salary and at the same time the government is recommending goosing the accrual rate so that we end up with higher pensions. That is about an 18% increase for the typical MP over what it would normally be. The government should not have done that. That poisons the whole thing.
The next point is that we believe this should be fully vetted in the House of Commons according to the regular procedure for any other bill. We are pushing this through. I know that there will be arguments made that this was agreed to, but I still want to argue that this should have been put off until the fall. We could have had a regular debate and even have had witnesses. That would have removed the appearance that we are pushing this through simply because we want to avoid the political heat. I am grateful for the chance to speak on this, but now that we are pushing this through we do not have that excuse any more. We cannot say that we did allow people to come and comment on this and bring forward their testimony. The result is that people will rightly say that we pushed it through. I think that is one of the problems.
The last point I want to make with respect to a stand that our party has taken in the past is that we believe very strongly that the government has poisoned the process by putting the opt out clause in the legislation. What it is attempting to do is suggest to the public that if we have concerns about the legislation and want to vote against it, then we should be duty bound to opt out. That is wrong. That is reprehensible. My friend said it correctly a minute ago: equal pay for equal work. This is a blatant attempt to unduly politicize this thing.
The problem is that the public is already confused by this. It is complicated. This confuses the issue even more. It is a blatant attempt to politicize this whole process. We should reject it. A pox on the government's house for suggesting it. It is clearly political manipulation, both of the public and of MPs who have concerns about the legislation.
My concerns do not end there, but those are some of the things we have raised in the past. I wanted to address them today to explain how some of the recommendations meet concerns that we have had and how other recommendations are completely at odds with our position.
There are other things I want to mention. I want to mention the retroactivity. I disagree with that. That was not a recommendation. I do not understand why we have the retroactivity. I do not understand why we have the extra salaries for chairs of committees and for vice-chairs, of which I am one, when we do not have parliamentary reform to go along with it.
My friend, our former House leader, brought forward a whole suite of changes that the Canadian Alliance would have liked to have seen introduced last February. They were sensible changes. They were changes aimed at democratizing this place, changes that would introduce democracy really for the first time in this place in a way that would do justice to this place, which is supposed to be the home of democracy in Canada.
Instead of that, we got some pretty lukewarm changes which the government introduced just the other day. We appreciate those changes, but they really hardly go anywhere near where we need to go so that people have confidence that this place is concerned about really allowing MPs to represent their constituents. We have not gone anywhere near far enough.
Until we have members of parliament from the opposition allowed to be elected to serve as chairs of different committees, apart from the couple that are already allowed, I do not think we can support that. I cannot support vice-chairs getting extra wages. I think it is wrong. I do not think we should not be doing it. It is not part of the recommendations. It is not what Canadians want, I think, until this place is really reformed. I oppose that and I think my colleagues in the Alliance and other MPs oppose it. We speak against that.
I want to conclude by saying that this is always a difficult issue. I do not enjoy being in a position where I have to vote on my own wages. MPs are fundamentally in a conflict of interest position. It is impossible for us to disentangle our personal interests from public policy. I am grateful that because of the recommendations this will be, I hope, the last time we have to deal with this for a long, long time, perhaps ever. I hope that is the case.
I strongly condemn the government for meddling in this process. We had the chance to bring down a set of recommendations from an independent third party that really would have given the appearance that this was an arm's length set of recommendations. That has been sullied now by the actions of the government.
Just so I am clear, I want my constituents to know and I want Canadians to know that I will support Canadian Alliance amendments to substantially alter this legislation. If they do not pass, I will vote against this legislation. Like many of my colleagues, I believe that Alliance MPs should be paid as much as other MPs because we believe that we do the same amount of work and we should receive the same pay, so we will opt for that as well.