They were fibreglass coffins, a new concept. I do not think the company sold a single one. It went down the tubes. That is the sort of thing the finance minister thought Canada pension plan should be used for. That was 11 years ago, but we have no reason to believe he has changed his beliefs.
I want to point to some of the other funds that the government has said in the past should be beyond the reach of government and should be used for very specific purposes. In fact, that is not the way it has panned out. Let us look, for instance, at employment insurance. Employment insurance ostensibly is there to provide benefits for workers in times of unemployment. Therefore, premiums should reflect the amount of money that is necessary to carry the country through a recession in order to provide benefits for unemployed workers. Typically, if I recall correctly, actuaries say that we would need to have a fund of about $15 billion. Right now the federal government has raised premiums to such a point with employment insurance that it has taken about $46 billion more out of workers' pockets than is necessary to provide benefits. That is $46 billion. I think people have every right to be concerned that the government will not leave the Canada pension plan fund alone. There is every reason to believe that perhaps it might dip into it at some point.
If people say that is nonsense, like my friend said a minute ago, I remind him of what happened to the public service pension plan when it ran a surplus. It ran what I think was a $10 billion surplus. I cannot recall exactly, but my friend says yes, it was $10 billion. What do we usually do when a pension plan runs a surplus like that? We go to a judge in whatever province we are and the judge decides how it should be divvied up based on how much the employer and the employee have put in. But there was no such due course in this case because the lawmaker was also the arbitrator, and the federal government took all of it. The public servants, of whom I suppose members of the New Democratic Party would be wildly supportive, were left high and dry because of it.
My point is simply that government is not a very good protector of pension funds or of the public's money in general. There are many other examples I could point to. In fact I could point to how well the NDP in British Columbia looked after the public's money when it came to certain elections in which that government was proposing that it had balanced budgets. In fact it was running a surplus, but in the end we found out we could not rely on what that government said.
That, in short, is the concern. We cannot rely on what governments say, so let us not speak about the unreliability of the markets. The markets at least are widely diversified, but government has total control over taxpayer money. We have no options when it controls that money. The result is that when things go sour, they go sour for everyone. We should be deeply concerned about that.
That is why I have very little faith in the government to keep its hands out of that big pool of cash, which is what is being proposed under Bill C-3. No, in fact the government cannot be relied upon.
I want to address the straw man that the member for Mississauga South erected and then proceeded to tear up, attributing the straw man to be the position of the Canadian Alliance. The member for Mississauga South said that the Canadian Alliance believes in a mandatory pension plan that people would have to contribute to whether or not they had a job. At least I think that is what he said. That is complete hokum. We have no such position. That is absolutely ludicrous.
We said that we should be open to exploring other ways to enhance the public's retirement benefits. That includes looking at other systems where they take at least a portion of the premiums that people pay toward a mandatory plan and use them to invest in RRSPs that would have to be locked in until a person's retirement. One could not speculate with these investments. There would be a fairly narrow range of things one could invest in. There would be all kinds of safeguards to ensure that there was prudence built into the plan. That is all we are advocating.
We are advocating that precisely for the reason my friend from Lanark--Carleton proposed a minute ago. We have a coming generational war between people who have been contributing into the Canada pension plan for a short period of time and who will then go into retirement and will receive in some cases eight or nine dollars to one dollar, compared to people who are just starting to pay into the Canada pension plan now and down the road will actually end up with a negative return. The member for Mississauga South doubted it but all he has to do is consult the chief actuary's report. He will see that people coming on stream today will not end up better off under the Canada pension plan.
When we take into account the opportunity cost, in other words what people could have done with that money if they had invested in bonds or an index fund, and compare it to the return they would get on the Canada pension plan, they end up definitely much worse off. That is no exaggeration. That is precisely what the chief actuary of the plan is saying.
We want to ensure that young people today have some options. That is all we are saying. We do not think it is fair to condemn those people to paying more and more of their money to taxes, thanks to the government, and more and more of their premiums to a Canada pension plan that leaves them actually worse off over the long run.
The final point I want to address is the lack of emphasis in this whole debate on the need to increase people's standard of living, their take home pay, as a way of enhancing their retirement. The Canadian Alliance for a long time has said that tax relief is an additional pillar that needs to be considered when we are talking about retirement incomes. It is fine to talk about changing the rules with respect to RSPs. We agree with that by the way. We think that RSP levels should be raised and we have argued for that. It was a plank in the last election campaign. We believe that very strongly and will continue to argue for that.
We believe that the CPP should be changed and I have just said a little about that. We believe in sustaining old age security and the spouse's allowance and all those things. We have no argument with that.
What we do say is that everyone will be better off, both in their current spending and in their ability to fend for themselves in their retirement, if we start to lower taxes in a more dramatic fashion. The government has run up a number of surpluses over the last number of years. What has it done? It has driven spending levels through the roof.
Today I heard the most hilarious thing I have heard in this place in a long time when the finance minister got up and said that as a percent of the GDP our spending has gone down. That is interesting but completely irrelevant. What is relevant is the amount of spending per capita. Has the spending per capita gone up in real dollars over the last number of years? It has gone through the roof. That is the real issue.
What we should be doing is establishing a level of spending per capita and staying at it, not continually raising it, crowding out private investment in the market.
Now that, in our judgment, we have more than adequate amounts of money going into the government coffers to provide all the goods and services that we need, we need to do a couple of things. We need to ensure that money goes to the things that are most important.
After the resignation of the Solicitor General today we can make a pretty strong argument that clearly that has not been the case in the last little while. We see all kinds of money going to pork-barrel type programs in different regions of the country, which is completely wrong. It is an offence to see the Prime Minister stand up and defend it, especially when one considers that the Solicitor General was breaking the criteria for the program that he was getting the money from.
If the rules are there, they should be abided by. It is the government that sets the rules. If it does not want them there, then get rid of them and at least be honest about it, but the government itself put the rules in place supposedly to protect the interests of taxpayers.
We believe that billions of dollars can be saved by pruning unnecessary programs, programs that are used for patronage and pork barrelling, programs that are of little or no benefit, or in some cases are actually injurious to the health of the private economy. Let us get rid of those, take the savings and put them toward things that really do help people, things like health care, which makes sense to us, and things like a few million dollars for the disability tax credit.
The members across the way try to claim the high ground when it comes to being concerned about the disabled. They are the ones who are proposing that the tax credit rules be tightened, thereby denying many thousands of disabled Canadians the ability to save a few dollars because they have extra expenses because of their disability. We think it is meanspirited. We would like to see the government take some of the savings pruned from pork barrelling and put it into things like that.
We would like to see the military strengthened. We would like to see money for health care. These are clearly things that Canadians value. There is about a $15 billion to $20 billion envelope in the government that we know is rife with waste and we would like to see that pruned. We also believe that we should take the savings, pay down debt and lower taxes.
If we look up on the wall in this place, there is a carved relief that reads “impôt tax”. Now if that does not speak volumes about this place, because it is a money-sucking hole when it comes to tax dollars. It is entirely appropriate that the relief up there has a little family of three, a mother, a father and a child. To me it just speaks volumes about the attitude around this place.
Families like that family depicted up there are held hostage by ridiculously high rates of taxation. It has an impact on the ability of people not only to look after their families but it also has an impact on their ability to set aside money for their retirement. We know that.
The statistics tell us that very few people can contribute to their RRSPs to the maximum. That has a lot to do with the high levels of taxation. We know that people have a negative savings rate or a very close to zero savings rate today because we have very high levels of taxation in Canada. When the finance minister was the industry minister, he pointed out that Canada's standard of living relative to that of the United States was lower than the poorest of the poor American states of Alabama and Mississippi. Those are not my words. It was the finance minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, who said those things when he was the industry minister.
The government needs to have a plan to lower taxes dramatically. It has no such plan. It needs to pay down debt in a rigorous way, not whenever it just decides to do it but as a line item in its budget. We would like to see a plan that overall convinces the world that Canada is a great place to invest, something that is certainly not reflected in the strength of the Canadian dollar today. We would like to see a government that produces a plan that gives Canadians some real hope.