Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question because it goes to the core of why the Supreme Court originally recommended that there would be an independent commission, whose report would be presented and essentially adopted as is, thereby obviating any need for Parliament itself or the cabinet or anybody else to actually go and reinvent the wheel and figure out by how much judges salaries should be increased.
The independent commission, as established, is the mechanism that the judges hoped would avoid this kind of a back and forth argument. Originally, it is worth noting and as the member mentioned, when the mechanism was created for the judges, it was felt that members of the House of Commons and the Senate could simply piggyback on that same salary adjustment mechanism, but it turned out, as I referred to in my speech, that lawyer and judge inflation is different than street inflation.
Many members of the House just felt that we could not, in fairness, accept the relatively rich increases that were being generated in the lawyer-judge area. We preferred to peg our salaries here to combinations of either the consumer price index or the industrial aggregate. Those numbers, those percentage increases, are closer to what I referred to earlier, regarding the bus driver in Winnipeg and the fish plant worker in Nova Scotia, tracked by Statistics Canada.
Members got the right idea and the Supreme Court had the right idea. At this point in time, I think the government is trying to change that and the future will tend for itself.