Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate today on the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. I appreciate that we are speaking to the Alliance amendment that was moved just before we went to question period. We in this caucus would not be supporting that. We could support it except for the last couple of phrases, because we do not agree with the direction the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is taking.
As I listened to the debate earlier today and the leadoff speaker, the parliamentary secretary, it seemed to me that if I could synthesize what he was trying to tell the House in terms of why the government is moving forward, there are about five points.
The first is to permit all amounts held to the credit of the Canada pension plan account to be transferred to this relatively new CPP Investment Board by repealing the requirement to maintain in the account a three month operating balance.
Second is to establish a means by which the investment board may be required to transfer funds to the government to the credit of this plan account so that the immediate obligations of the account can be met.
Third is to transfer to the investment board over a three year period the right, title or interest in each security held by the Minister of Finance and establish the conditions on which the securities may be redeemed or replaced.
Fourth is to provide that the foreign property limit in the Income Tax Act applies to the investment board and its subsidiaries on a consolidated basis and to provide that the investment board will be considered to hold the property of its subsidiaries for the purpose of applying this foreign property limit.
The final point is to make housekeeping amendments to the investment board's reporting requirements and procedures.
The NDP position on this, and we will get into this in some detail, is that all pension trust documents must require a joint trusteeship, that all pension moneys are, after all, the deferred wages of the employees, that any pension surplus should be used only to improve benefits and that as deferred wages the funds have to be invested carefully, safely and wisely so as to show the greatest return for the beneficiaries of the plan within the investment guidelines as set out in the trust documents.
The New Democratic Party comes at pension plans with a great deal of history over many years, beginning with J.S. Woodsworth, the leader of the Canadian Co-operative Federation, the precursor of the New Democratic Party, followed by M.J. Coldwell as our leader, Tommy Douglas, and of course Stanley Knowles, the longtime member for Winnipeg North Centre. Our party has fought consistently over more than half a century for public pension plans so that our senior citizens, after a lifetime of work and service to their communities and their country, have the ability to retire with some dignity. People like Woodsworth and Douglas fought for these plans when a cradle to grave social program did not have all the negative connotations that we hear about in this day and age.
When the CPP plan first came into effect in 1966, my father was in mid-fifties. He recognized that he would be a beneficiary, that he would be able to draw that pension plan in another nine years at retirement age. He held different jobs in his life, but at that time he was farming and did not work for an organization or a company where he had a pension plan of any kind.
As it turned out, he was killed in an industrial accident and never had an opportunity to cash in on a pension plan, but I can say that he was very pleased in 1966 when the government came forward with a Canada pension plan that he would have been entitled to. As I say this, I recall that of course my mother would have been entitled to some of those benefits down the road as a survivor of my father's passing.
Just when we thought we had won these kinds of public pension plans and had some security and dignity for senior citizens, along comes the Reform Party, now the Canadian Alliance, and says we do not need public pension plans, let us tear the whole thing down.