moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should amend the definition of “pensionable employment” in the Canada Pension Plan to include worker's compensation payments.
Mr. Speaker, I will start off by reading out Motion No. 197 so that everyone is aware of exactly what it is:
That, in the opinion of this House the government should amend the definition of “pensionable employment” in the Canada Pension Plan to include worker's compensation payments.
For a lot of people it was quite a surprising thing to know that workers' compensation payments were not considered pensionable employment. There is no question that if a person is receiving workers' compensation payments, if they have had a workplace injury and if they have been in the workplace working, they would have been paying into the Canada pension plan, unless of course their income was so very low that they did not meet the yearly qualifying amount. I would not doubt that there are some industries out there that would still be proud of the fact that they have workers who might be working a good number of hours and still do not have to make CPP payments.
The bottom line is that it was recognized that when a person works a certain number of hours and makes a certain income, they pay Canada pension plan premiums and as a result they receive the benefits of the Canada pension plan.
I want to thank the members of the subcommittee on private members' business for choosing to make this motion votable. This will allow all hon. members of the House to stand and be counted on this extremely important issue.
The issue we are dealing with here is very important to me as a member of Parliament for the Churchill riding. I am proposing that the Government of Canada seek to extend the Canada pension plan to injured workers receiving workers' compensation payments. My motion would do this by including workers' compensation payments in the definition of pensionable employment found in the Canada Pension Plan.
The economy of my constituency is heavily dependent on resource industries like mining and forestry which suffer from higher rates of workplace injury than most others. Over the course of my life in working in the health care sector, I saw far too many people who had been injured in the course of doing their jobs.
I know how workplace injuries can take a terrible toll on the victims, their families and their communities. When a person who wants nothing more than to work hard and make a living suffers an injury on the job, the physical injury is bad enough, but oftentimes the financial injury is just as devastating to the individual and the family.
Provincial workers' compensation programs are one of the ways we as a society try to help the victims of workplace accidents with their physical and financial injuries. Most people recognize that if they were injured and unable to work, they too would want a little help and support workers' compensation programs on the principle that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated ourselves.
In the initiating years of the workers' compensation program, it came into being not to provide some kind of insurance for workers. It came into being to protect employers from being sued for work related accidents that resulted in an employee being injured.
In the United States we often see advertisements offering help to get claims against employers. In Canada we chose to do things differently. There was a sort of no fault system put in place called workers' compensation. Over the years that has changed and workers have received less and less benefits from workers' compensation programs throughout the country. I think most provinces have found ways to slice away at what workers are receiving.
The purpose of this motion is not to get the federal government involved with provincial workers' compensation programs. As we all know, workers' compensation falls under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The New Democratic Party is committed to a decentralized asymmetrical federation and it is not our policy to support federal intrusion into a provincial jurisdiction.
My colleague from the Bloc was extremely pleased that was to be the case, but I am sure that is not the only reason she will be speaking this evening. Rather, this motion is geared toward correcting what I see as an oversight in the Canada pension plan that unduly penalizes injured workers.
Before I go on to explain exactly how it penalizes injured workers and how my motion would fix it, I should say that although the Canada pension plan is a federal program, I recognize that it does not apply to the citizens of Quebec.
The Quebec government has exercised its right to opt out of the Canada pension plan and has instead put in place its own program known as the QPP. My proposed change to the CPP will have absolutely no effect on injured workers in Quebec or the Quebec pension plan. Nevertheless I hope that I will be able to count on all my hon. colleagues from Quebec to vote in favour of this motion when the time comes so that injured workers in the rest of the country can benefit.
Regarding how the Canada pension plan penalizes injured workers, the key point to keep in mind is that a retiree's Canada pension plan eligibility is calculated based upon the number of months of pensionable employment. Since the Canada pension plan does not currently include workers' compensation under the definition of pensionable employment, each month a person spends on workers' compensation counts against them when they retire and their CPP eligibility is calculated. Each month on workers' compensation is treated like the person was not working and had no income. This is hardly fair since a person on workers' compensation is by definition unable to work, and not unwilling to work or without a job.
How does this penalize an injured worker? When a person retires and claims the Canada pension plan benefit, the amount of the pension depends upon the average pensionable income during one's contributory period. The contributory period begins at age 18 or 1996, whichever is later, and goes until retirement. Basically it covers a person's entire adult working life, so each month one does not have any pensionable income, the average income is lower and the pension is lower. This is not a fair way to treat a person who is unable to work because of an injury.
Currently the Canada pension plan allows what is called a 15% dropout period. This allows a person to exclude 15% of one's working months from the CPP calculation. By excluding one's lowest earning months, it raises the average earnings and the final pension amount.
While the 15% dropout can partially mitigate the impact of an injury on someone's pension, it alone is not enough to offset the penalties injured workers face from the Canada pension plan. This is because most of us earn our lowest incomes in our youth and higher incomes later in our working lives. It does not take much of our working life to amass the small percentage of months that we are allowed to exclude from our CPP contributory period. Many of us have used up this time by our mid-twenties.
The problem for someone who suffers an injury and has to go on workers' compensation is that suddenly they find the month they are injured eating up the small percentage of months they are allowed to exclude from their Canada pension plan calculation.
Now consider what happens to a person who suffers a severe injury requiring a lengthy period of rehabilitation such as an amputation, a severe burn or an electrocution. The lost months of CPP eligibility dramatically reduce that person's retirement income. Think about it. The more seriously a person is injured, the more they are penalized in the pension calculation. Is this how a just and caring society should be treating its injured and disabled? This is morally wrong and my motion is about changing that.
At the heart of the matter, this really is a moral issue. I hope I have not been boring hon. members this evening with this history lesson on the Canada pension plan. Let me boil this down to its core moral argument. The Canada pension plan was created to provide Canadian workers with a secure retirement income and we should stop excluding injured workers from its full benefit.
This is not some abstract problem that I am trying to solve with this motion. Real people with real injuries are seeing their retirement incomes and their ability to live with dignity in their old age eroded because workers' compensation is excluded from the CPP.
The very existence of this problem came to my attention because it was happening to some of my constituents who then came to see me about it. These were hardworking people who had suffered the misfortune of serious injuries that forced them onto workers' compensation during their prime earning years. Those lost years have had a serious impact on their pension incomes, making it more difficult for them to live with the dignity they deserve in retirement.
The same thing could happen to anyone who gets injured on the job. One mishap on the job site and a person could be facing retirement in poverty. This is not a threat Canadians should have to live with.
I know there is a stigma surrounding injured workers in some people's eyes. Some people look at injured workers and think they are just milking their injuries. I think anyone who has had any experience with workers' compensation would know how mistaken this impression really is.
The reality is that less than 1% of workers' compensation claims are fraudulent. However, as with so many services and benefits, until people are in need, they really do not understand.
I urge all hon. members not to let the unfortunate stigma that surrounds injured workers impair their judgment on this motion. Instead members should ask themselves how they would want the system to work if they, their spouse or their child were injured.
I know that through the Canada Pension Plan Act there must be agreement of the provinces for changes to the legislation. What I have before the House today is the start of that process to get the provinces on side to make the changes so that we do not see those workers who have had to go on workers' compensation unjustly treated.
I recognize there may be different ways of doing that. We should be open to that. I am quite understanding of that process.
Throughout the country there is no one set workers' compensation plan. In some provinces more than others workers receive even less payments on workers' compensation. Even after being on workers' compensation, a good number of workers may not be able to go back to work.
There is no rule out there that says a person will have a job forever. A person may have lost not just their valuable earning years; a person may have lost their opportunity to earn.
A number of years ago I was shocked when a colleague's 16-year-old son while working at his summer employment quite badly damaged his arm by getting it caught in a conveyor belt. I was shocked that if he were to receive some kind of compensatory assistance or help, everything would be based on the wage he was making at that time. He was a student being paid minimum wage and that would have been how things would have been geared even if it had been a more serious injury.
During my first year as a member of Parliament, a 19-year-old man went into a workplace with no proper training ahead of time and ended up blind. Again, a life which possibly would end up on welfare forever after something like this happened because workers' compensation plans are different throughout the country.
What we as the federal Parliament under the federal acts must do is ensure that the plans we have in place benefit those workers in spite of what happens in each and every province. During those periods of time when workers are on workers' compensation they should be able to at least claim those benefit times.
Again, because it varies from province to province it is hard to get the exact figures as to how each province would put this in place and what the costs would be. Without question they automatically say it is going to be huge costs for workers' compensation.
I say to each and every one of us that may very well be. However, there are alternate ways of dealing with this and I already know of a few suggestions that have come up. As we proceed with the debate, we will come up with more of those figures. It is difficult to obtain specific figures from the provinces because they automatically like to say it will cost them too much.
I would say to them that those workers should have been working, but they were injured in the course of their employment. They should not have a double jeopardy against them and be denied the full benefit of the Canada pension plan because of that injury. They were injured in the workplace. We need to come up with a system where they are not losing out.