Oh yes, you have.
The Canadian Alliance says not to trust the public to be able to invest in these plans, let us give it over to the private sector, to private interests.
The government, for its part, says that is just right wing rhetoric which everyone should ignore, but then it quietly goes off and slowly but surely implements these kinds of half-baked ideas that are coming out.
I think the jury is still very much out on the CPP investment board. It talks about an arm's length relationship and we respond by saying if it is at arm's length it is very soon going to be out of reach entirely.
What is forgotten is that the money from the pension plans comes from both employees and employers. We know that the employers are well represented on the CPP investment board, but we ask respectfully where the heck are the employees in all of this? Where are they represented? Where are their interests represented in what the CPP investment board is doing with these public funds?
The board was created in 1997 to invest a portion of public pension money into equities, but now the legislation that we have before us is to move all pension plan assets immediately to the board. I know that seniors are very concerned about what is going on with this proposal.
The chief actuary, according to the Alliance member who spoke before question period, warned some time ago that the CPP fund was out of control and we were going to hit a huge bulge in about 2031 if action was not taken. For his warnings he was fired from the position. I would counter by looking at the investments of the CPP investment board. I wonder if it is not going to get a whole lot worse, because based on recent returns it is not exactly managing and investing the money very wisely, which I will get into shortly.
The Alliance member asks about the younger worker. The return has been only 2% for the worker that has come into the workforce since the 1980s. Our reply to this is that there is no recognition in that argument of the intergenerational transfer, the fact that we have built schools for post-secondary education and we have done a lot of other things. Together there is a recognition in our country that people grow up, go to school, get their education and enter the workforce, and then when they have completed their life's work they have an opportunity to retire with some dignity. This whole shift out of public pensions and into private pension plans fails to recognize those kinds of realities and I think it is extremely important that they be recognized.
I also want to note in passing that there is no spokesperson in this debate for the Bloc Québécois. There is a very genuine reason why it is not participating in the debate. Quebec has its own pension plan. At the time the CPP plan came in, Quebec had its own plan. It has not gone down this highly questionable road in terms of its pension money, so I assume the Bloc feels there is no need to participate in the debate.
I mentioned that the CPP investment board has not been doing very well. Let us accept at the outset that investments over the last year or so have not been good. It has been a bear market, as others would say, and a lot of investments in mutual funds and others have had poor or negative returns.
However, just for the record, it is important to point out that over the first six months of last year the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board managed to lose $4 billion of people's pension funds. That is a fairly significant loss. It represents just over 20% of the equity in that fund, which disappeared in the first six months of last year. The $2.5 billion that it lost in the second quarter of last year was by far the largest loss since the investment fund began in 1999. The $4 billion overall that it lost was double the $1.7 billion that it lost the year before. This is hardly a success story so far.
Despite that, Mr. MacNaughton, the CPP Investment Board president and CEO says that all is well, no need to worry, that over the long run these things are just little blips in the system and this will not hurt the pension plan of Canadians.