Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I will wrap up at this point.
The suggestion that people who oppose the legislation should not have to or should not be expected to live within it is inappropriate. It is a great and sad irony that those who oppose this type of legislation in order to protect taxpayers are sometimes pointed at as being the villains of this type of legislation.
I would also say that it is certainly a matter of principle in our caucus that whatever an individual MP decides to do following the bill, whether he or she votes for it or against it, takes or does not take some of it, be it Liberal, Alliance or whatever, there will be no personal recriminations from one MP to another as far as we are concerned. Those will be private matters.
I will close by saying that Bill C-28 should be opposed and denounced. We call on the government to table new legislation that respects the recommendations of the Lumley commission, the prohibition against politicians setting their own salaries and the fundamental principle in a democracy that if two people do the same job for the same employer they should get the same money.
I have an amendment to Bill C-28. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following therefor:
“Bill C-28, an act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act, the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act and the Salaries Act be not now read a third time, but be referred back to Committee of the Whole for the purposes of reconsidering clause 29 to study its impact on the prime minister's pension taking into account the recommendation from the Lumley Commission that the changes to members' compensation `not result in any material impact, either positive or negative, to the benefits that parliamentarians receive from the pension plan'.”