Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise and address Bill C-3, an act to amend the Canada Pension Plan and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act. I would love to just jump in and start addressing some of the things I just heard but I want to do this in some semblance of order.
First I want to attack some of the myths I heard perpetuated earlier today by members of the NDP, primarily about the reliability of the market. I also want to say a little bit about the reliability of government. I want to address the straw man that the member for Mississauga South erected about the Canadian Alliance's plan to address the Canada pension plan. I also want to say a little about the lack of emphasis in the whole debate on the benefits of reducing taxes and increasing disposable incomes as a way to enhance people's retirement. Let me start with some of the myths I heard earlier today.
Every time the NDP members get up they talk about Enron. They want to talk about the lack of reliability of the market as an investment vehicle. There is no denying that Enron has been an unmitigated disaster, but there are thousands of companies out there and it is only the very few that go bad and get all the publicity. I do not think there is any question that overall the market provides a superior rate of return to anything else we have found to this point. If people stick with it and invest over the long run they end up better off.
I ask my friends from the NDP, where do they think jobs come from? They come from the market. That is where people find their incomes on a day to day basis. They rely on the market. They do not rely on government. Government cannot create jobs and the societies that have tried to create jobs through government of course are the ones that have crashed and burned and imploded on themselves. The fact is that we get our income standard of living from the government. We get the premiums that are available for the CPP from the market.
Finally, we get all the taxes that are necessary to run the government from the market. That does not mean that the market does not go down sometimes, that people do not become unemployed, but rather obviously it is in the interest of a country to ensure that the private sector and the market are as strong as they can possibly be because that is where our wealth, our prosperity, will come from.
The very first thing that we need to do when we sit down to have a big debate about retirement systems is to ensure that whatever we do enhances the ability of the private sector, the market, to produce jobs and incomes for people. To run it down as being unreliable really ignores some facts.
That brings me to my second point, which is that the government is far more unreliable in terms of its ability to safeguard people's money than the market. Look at the Canada pension plan as a starter. When the Canada pension plan was formed, the government took the money and lent it to the provinces at below market rates of interest. In other words, Canadians were dutifully paying their premiums while the government, instead of looking out for people who would be getting their pensions, decided it would distribute this largesse to the provinces at below market rates of interest, which maybe would enhance its standing with the provinces but would cheat Canadians out of their pension benefits. That was the first thing it did.
How well does it administer the Canada pension plan even today? Let us remember that it was not very long ago, and I see some Liberals across the way who will remember this, when the government proposed to raise the Canada pension plan premiums by 73% and max them out at 9.9%. The chief actuary at the time called into question the government's assumptions about whether or not those types of premium hikes would be adequate. He was fired for that. It really calls into question the assertions from members across the way that somehow the investment board will be at arm's length from the government, because the actuary was supposed to be at arm's length from the government as well. Notwithstanding that, the chief actuary was fired for having the temerity to point out that the premiums the finance department was proposing would not be adequate to fund the Canada pension plan over the long run.
I also want to point out that there is good cause to suspect that Canada pension plan funds would be redirected beyond just putting them into the stock market index, as has been proposed right now. Where does that come from? Why do I make that assumption? I make it because in 1991, when the former finance minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard, was running for the Liberal leadership, he proposed at the time that the Canada pension plan be used for regional development. In other words, he wanted to take those billions of dollars which were being set aside for people's pensions and gamble them on all kinds of crazy schemes out in the regions.