Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy my hon. colleague's interventions because he does remind me that there is still fear of the Bolsheviks out there, at least in his riding.
I would like to take him up on what he is saying. He said that if one does not produce, one gets fired. Fair enough. That is something that working people know in every industry in this country. It is a rule that exists everywhere in this country, except if one is the CEO of a large corporation. If the CEO does not produce, the CEO does not get fired. The CEO gets a golden handshake with a massive golden parachute and a payout of millions and millions of dollars. We have seen that with corporation after corporation. Let us have a bit of accountability here.
What we have seen in terms of these packages that have been given to CEOs over the last 10 years is that it has not created productivity in the workplace. In fact, look at the 1990s when there was massive downsizing in corporations across the country, firings of thousands of workers in operations that were viable, that were done because the CEOs were being paid in stock options. Every time there was a major downsizing, there was a blip in the market and it allowed their own personal stock options to increase. If that is an example of the free market, I would say there is something not quite free about that.
What we have been arguing for is a fair market. We want to ensure that corporate CEOs are accountable not to the shareholders but to society as a whole. We do not see why they should be getting $56 million a year and it should be written off as a normal tax expense.
If companies want to pay that kind of exorbitant, outrageous fee to people who simply are not worth it, and I will repeat it, who simply are not worth it, that is a corporate decision they can make, but they should be fully taxed on it, because they could easily put that money into investing and growing their corporation and being much more viable in the long term. However, we have created this culture of entitlement, a culture actually, to switch gears, of which the Liberal Party has always been in favour, but this is outrageous entitlement, $56 million a year for the kind of service we have seen.
I would like to ask the hon. member, given the recent outrageous number of derailments that we have seen at CN in the last three months, whether he would consider $56 million a year to be a little rich for a CEO of a corporation with that kind of record.