Madam Speaker, there is a duality of responsibility. The reason the pension protection which normally is regulated at the provincial level ends up here is that the bankruptcy legislation is federal. Oftentimes the provinces say, “We do not need to do anything with the pensions beyond just monitoring, regulating, making sure the payments are being made and providing an accounting of accounts, et cetera. The real legislation has to be changed at the federal level, the bankruptcy level”.
Quite frankly, the labour movement and workers have been chasing their tails and have been sent around in a spin. That is why we are creating a beachhead on this issue and saying that once and for all, in the case of a bankruptcy, let us make sure that pensions are the top priority. It is that straight up.
Relating to that, and this is important because I know it is easy to mislead folks on this one, in Ontario the Bob Rae government brought in a bill that was known as too big to fail, meaning that the super large corporations like General Motors and Algoma are not going to fail, and upon application would be allowed to defer some pension payments.
I am glad I have a chance to clarify this between federal and provincial. Under that legislation a corporation had to make an actual written proposal. Within that proposal it had to show how much money it was going to defer, how long it was going to take to catch up and by what date will it not only have kept current accounts going in the latter years of the plan but by what date will it give an absolute 100% catch-up on that. It was meant to be an interim measure.
When we were in government a couple of proposals were put in front of us under our structural legislation and we approved them. To the best of my knowledge every one of those proposals did exactly what they purported to do, which was to provide a little cash flow in the short term but over the medium term the money was entirely paid back and those funds are now where they should be.
What happened in the case of Stelco, which unfortunately is the poster child for people getting screwed out of their pensions, was that a proposal was made by Stelco after the Rae government had been defeated and Mike Harris had taken over. Mike Harris approved the Stelco plan and there was nothing in it about when the money would be paid back. There was no time period for catch-up. There was nothing. It was merely Stelco asking if it could avoid paying its pension payments for a while under a certain clause and the Mike Harris government very nicely rubber stamped it and said yes. A few years later, bingo, we are into this jackpot.
The Conservatives to this day still blame Bob Rae for bringing in the structural legislation. That legislation did what it was supposed to do. It was the government of the day that did not do its job to protect those pensions and workers. That is why we are here today, to fix at the federal level what cannot be fixed at the provincial level.