Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak on behalf of my colleague for Churchill, and her excellent Motion No. 197, which reads:
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.
The motion is designed to allow injured workers who have had to take temporary leave from their workplace to, on retirement, get the same level of CPP that they would have received had they not had to leave for a certain period of time because of injury.
The idea is very simple and I believe it is very sensible. I really cannot understand why the government has not already implemented this small but significant change to the CPP.
To understand what the motion does, we have to look at the problems that injured workers face relating to the pension system.
At present, worker's compensation is not considered pensionable employment for CPP purposes. Since a retiree's CPP eligibility is based upon months of pensionable employment, each month of work a person misses due to injury counts against them when the CPP eligibility is calculated upon retirement.
In cases of severe injuries that require lengthy rehabilitation periods, such as amputations, severe burns and electrocution, these lost months of CPP eligibility can dramatically reduce an individual's retirement income or leave them ineligible for any CPP benefits at all. This is in essence a second injury.
The CPP program was created to provide Canadian workers with a secure retirement income. There is no intention in the design of the public pension plan that workers would lose their pension simply because they had the bad fortune to be injured on the job. This problem is in fact significant in size.
In the nine provinces covered by the CPP, there were over 800,000 claims via worker's compensation in 2000. The fact that these people could potentially lose or see a reduced retirement pension is, I believe, unacceptable. After all, worker's compensation systems are designed to get people back into the workforce, and most treat their clients as workers temporarily on leave from their jobs. That is of course how we should treat them.
These people want to work and they strive to work. With the proper accommodation and support, most will work. The problem is with systems the governments have in place, like the CPP, that seem to treat injured workers as individuals who have deliberately opted out of the workforce and then reduce their retirement benefits accordingly.
As the critic for persons with disabilities for the New Democrats, I see courage and determination every day and every week from people who have had to leave work due to a disability, including a workplace injury.
What is most frustrating to these people is not that they face life with a disability but that the public support systems that most Canadians take for granted, things like the CPP, public transit, health supports and income supports further penalize them on a systematic and repeated basis.
We should have a public pension plan which acknowledges that injured workers are simply on a temporary leave and therefore should not suffer a financial penalty of a reduced pension due to their injury.
Since worker's compensation programs are provincially administered, implementation of the motion would require agreements with the provinces. Passing Motion No.197 would therefore only be a first step. It would nevertheless be an important first step as it would signal to the federal and provincial executive branches that there is a legislative support for the principle that injured workers should not have to suffer the loss of pension benefits.
This is not a huge problem because the provinces already meet with the federal government over CPP issues regularly and the provinces understand injured workers better than the federal government does.
I should note that the motion would have no impact on Quebec where a separate program administered by the Quebec government, the Quebec pension plan, takes the place of the CPP which exists in the rest of Canada.
While I wholeheartedly support the motion, I want to also take the opportunity to discuss a parallel problem and situation: another group that suffers a similar penalty under the CPP, as injured workers currently do, and that is the group of caregivers.
On March 10 in The Toronto Star there was an article by Carol Goar about a woman named Marie Taylor. I will quote a bit from Ms. Goar's succinct and well written article about Ms. Taylor's situation:
She worked all her life as a legal secretary. Her husband was head of security at the Lennox generating station in eastern Ontario. They spent their spare time building a comfortable home in Napanee to share in their retirement years.
Twice during Taylor's career, she took leaves of absence. The first was to look after her gravely ill stepson. The second was to care for her dying mother.
She had no idea how costly these acts of compassion would turn out to be.
Shortly after retiring, Taylor lost her life partner. Now she's struggling to hang on to her home.
The reason her finances are so precarious is that her Canada Pension is smaller than she anticipated. The government chopped her entitlement by 20 per cent because of the two interruptions in her working life.
Ms. Taylor was not ill herself but she was caring for others who were ill. She is in the same situation that injured workers face and that Motion No. 197 is trying to address, namely, losing retirement benefits under the CPP because of temporary interruptions in a career. But in the case of Ms. Taylor, her workplace interruption was not because she was injured or ill, but because she became a caregiver during the terminal illnesses of her stepson and mother. If she had been callous and had left her family's care to the inadequacies of the Ontario health care system, then she would not have suffered this financial penalty. Instead, she did the right thing and therefore lost 20¢ on the dollar of her retirement income.
Because of caring for loved ones, she is currently at the CPP appeals tribunal fighting for sufficient income so she can stay in her modest home and keep from sliding into poverty. Most shamefully, the federal government is fighting her all the way with its lawyers through its appeal system. The federal government should stop harassing this woman and intervene so she and other caregivers do not face penalties for caring for a dying relative.
In fairness, the government has started to see that caregivers deserve support, not punishment. I acknowledge that baby steps were taken on the employment insurance front in the budget, but our overall social safety net, both federally and provincially, has to be looked at so we can take away the barriers that persecute caregivers.
We need to look at welfare and disability programs, CPP and private insurance programs, and compassionate leave systems in the workplace. We need to institute a national home care and respite care program and reform our overly bureaucratic, financially unfair and almost incomprehensible income tax system. Other countries already have brought in these common sense, compassionate policies without causing economic problems. Some have even started to directly compensate caregivers, including Britain, Norway, Sweden and Australia, so a rethinking of our overall policy for both injured workers and for caregivers is not only doable but long overdue.
In summary, I say that injured workers need our support, not our punishment, that caregivers need our support, not our punishment, and that we should reform the CPP program in order to do this. Caregivers and injured workers do not deserve to be punished.
I once again thank my friend from Churchill for this visionary motion and I call upon the government and all members to support the motion and start the journey to a more compassionate society.