Madam Speaker, I thank all my colleagues who have taken the time to speak on this motion. I recognize that everyone has wonderful accolades for workers and feels that they should be looked after, but somehow they are not willing to take that extra step and actually put them first, in front of banks, in front of the government and in front of other creditors.
Somehow in this country workers are still at the bottom and, quite frankly, still underground a lot of the time, a lot of them dead because of their toil. Somehow most of the members in the House are still putting them at the bottom. I will tell the House that very few company executives or people in business offices end up dying from their work, unlike the workers who are most gravely affected by this type of legislation.
The government representative who spoke on the motion tonight, much like the one who spoke on my motion yesterday, used the argument that “if something's not broken, don't fix it”. But the reality is that the system is broken. We do not have a good pension plan and safety net in place. That is extremely apparent to anyone who has seen the media over the last two years or has read about the risks to pension funds. Everyone knows there is a problem and we need to fix it.
What we are asking is to put workers first. I know that the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions is supposed to ensure that enough money is in the pension fund deposit to ensure that it can be paid out. But the reality is that only a percentage of the amount has to be there and, in a good many cases, just like the Air Canada case, the pension fund has been shorted. In my view, this is legalized theft.
Employees paid into that fund. Their employers paid into that fund as well. That was their agreement: “I will work for you if you do this for me”. In essence, what has happened is legalized theft. Money that belonged to employees was used for something else. We are saying that this needs to be corrected. That is what I am asking for. There is a problem. Anyone who does not think there is a problem has had their head in the sand for the last two or three years.
I brought this motion to the floor of the House of Commons as a result of workers in my riding who right now are working for companies that have not gone bankrupt but who know that their pension fund is short. They know it is short a fair bit. When it should be at about 70% or 80%, it is at about 20% less. Employees have been trying to make sure that money gets put into the fund. If their companies go bankrupt today, they are at the bottom of the pit thanks to everyone in this House who does not make an effort to change this legislation and put workers first. It is bad enough that employees do not get their wages if there is no money, but they will also not get their pensions, which were supposed to keep them secure in their later years for retirement.
My colleague from Perth--Middlesex commented that he has experienced this and that it could have ramifications on both employers and banks. In most cases, banks make up a good amount of the money on the interest anyway and they are in a far better position to be able to survive after a bankruptcy than employees in the workplace.
There are others who suffer as result of this problem. Whole communities suffer. If a business goes bankrupt in a small community and the pension funds and wages are not there, every business in that community suffers. By ensuring that this legislation is in place we are actually stabilizing some of those communities in a good many instances, as far as I am concerned. Most important, we are telling workers in this country that they count, that they are first, that they are number one. We are telling them that we know they have worked and they should be taken into account.
This is the House of Commons. This is not the house of employers. This is not the house for the corporate elite. This is the house of commoners. I know that some people in here get a little high on the hog sometimes and see themselves as a bit better than the carpenter or the miner or the truck driver, but the bottom line is that we are supposed to be representing those people, all those airline workers who are going to lose their pensions. We are supposed to be here representing them, and it is time we did.