Mr. Speaker, there are four points to this bill. In the course of debate a couple of others have been brought in.
I would like to deal with those others first, one of those being the opt in clause. In my opinion the opt in clause is really not part of the bill. It has nothing to do with the legislation, the salary, the pension, the transparency or anything else. It is nothing more than the pure gamesmanship that is displayed in the House from time to time, not only by the government but by many people in the House. It should basically be discarded as if it were not there. The second thing I have a problem with is not the legislation itself, but rather the speed with which the legislation was brought in.
I have difficulty with one the four parts of the bill that deals with pensions. I have been fighting for years for pension reform. I attempted to bring in a private member's bill for genuine consideration by all members. I also attempted to bring in an amendment, but because of the short timeline and its complexity it was impossible to put into an acceptable form. Consequently my amendment, as drafted with the help of legislative counsel, was ruled out of order. Even if it had been in order, because of the speed the bill went through committee of the whole consideration we would not have reached my amendment in any case.
The bill has four distinctive parts and that is what we need to look at. The first one deals with transparency, the elimination of the non-taxable portion of an MP's pay. That is something we have been fighting for years.
After the 1997 election the government virtually ignored the recommendations of the Blais commission. It is nice to see this time, with a couple of exceptions or modifications, it is following what the report said. It would have been better had it done that in 1997.
The bill is to eliminate the non-taxable amount and gross it up so that we would end up with what is supposed to be the same pay. I will get to that point in a moment because it is not.
It also provides outside linkage for increases in the future so that MPs never again get into what is tantamount to a conflict of interest in trying to deal with their own remuneration, pensions and other benefits inside the House. It takes it out of our hands and hopefully it will remain out of our hands.
We could argue all day on what it should have been linked to, whether it should have been linked to judges as it was or whether it should have been linked to the federal service at large. That is an amendment I certainly would have supported. At least it was not linked to something that has no relevance to the House whatsoever, such as airline pilots, doctors or something of that nature, because it happened to suit somebody's notion of how to get a raise.
Then we get to the raise itself. Here is an area where no one was doing their homework. According to the Debates and the newspapers we are talking about a 20% increase. That is based on the assumption that $109,500 is the direct grossed up equivalent of what we were getting before the bill comes into effect. That is not the case.
I do not know who came up with that figure or how they arrived at it, but it does not take a whole lot of homework to check it out. I phoned a tax accountant in my province of British Columbia who went through the tax tables and worked it out. The balanced amount is not $109,500 but $115,100. That means that the raise is not 20% but about 14%.
It will vary a little bit from province to province. The raise is a bit more in Alberta, a bit less in Saskatchewan, and in Quebec taxes are higher still so the raise is even less than 14%.
During the parts of the debate that I heard no one seemed to raise a fact that appeared in one of the papers I was reading today which said that we have had a 2% raise every year for the past many years. The truth of the matter is that over the past 10 years we have had an aggregate total of a 6% increase, which is far behind any other sector including the public sector.
I do not believe personally that the pay raise is out line. Backdating it to January is a little inflammatory, kind of like when the postal strike was settled by legislating a settlement that was less than the employer had offered. It was one of those unnecessary movements on the part of the government that only caused to inflame feelings unnecessarily.
That brings me to the fourth and the only part of the bill to which I object dealing with the pension. The pension amount would simply go up because the pay goes up. The intent of the recommendations made by the commission was that it should go up exactly in line with the amount we were already getting. Other than the raise there would be no gain or no loss. Keeping it at 3% gives us a tremendous gain.
The amendment I wished to put forward and my private member's bill presently before the House at first reading say that after getting rid of the non-taxable grossing up, as the bill has done, the pension of members of Parliament should be eliminated in its entirety. Instead all members should be placed in the federal public superannuation program, the same as all other public servants.
That would provide a lot of benefits for MPs without it being a cost factor to Canadians. It would allow newly elected MPs who previously worked in government at either the federal, provincial or municipal level, crown corporations, the RCMP, the military and many private corporations that have transfer agreements with the federal program, to transfer their pension and carry on. It would also allow members who left this place and then worked for one of those areas to take their pension with them.
When we leave this place our pension is on hold until we turn 55. If someone ends up out of service in their early forties their pension is based on their salary. By the time they reach 55, it is possibly based on a salary from as much as 15 years before. It is better to carry the pension with them.
I do not know what I will do when it comes time to vote on the bill tonight because part of our policy and our principles is that MPs should not be voting on their pay. Notwithstanding the fact that the party's policy states that, I have a greater problem with the fact that voting on this bill places my colleagues and I in a clear conflict of interest.
I voted for the bill at second reading because I wanted to get it to committee of the whole stage where it could be amended. It has gone through that stage without any amendment. I did not vote on it at committee of the whole stage. I may very well not vote on it intentionally when it comes up for a vote tonight.
I say for the record so there is no misunderstanding that I do not intend to opt out of the pay. I earn what I earn in this place and I work as hard as other members. Any member who takes an arbitrary stand to turn it down is being foolish. He or she would be trying to make a point that I guarantee will be lost on the public.
Bill C-28 is a controversial bill. At least we will be able to put it to rest. Hopefully we are now balanced and never again will this type of legislation come to the House.