Madam Speaker, thank you for this opportunity and your ruling. That was in fact one of the points that I was going to raise in debate. This bill did appear to require a royal recommendation and I think that you have clarified that point. In some respects, it makes the debate a bit moot because it is very doubtful that the government will give a royal recommendation to this particular bill.
This debate takes place in the context that Canadians are exceedingly worried about their pensions. We saw a demonstration this week by Nortel employees in front of Parliament Hill. It was a very moving and powerful demonstration of people who have worked for a very long time with a particular company that has gone bankrupt.
They experience a double whammy. First, their pensions have literally gone south with the bankruptcy because the assets of Nortel have in some measure gone to the United States to be distributed according to the laws in the United States, which leaves Canadian pensioners out in the cold.
Here, the pensioners rank behind certain categories of creditors. It is a double hit as far as they are concerned. They rank below secured creditors here and those assets that are attributable to the American operation take priority and go south, so those assets cannot be realized either.
The Nortel folks are in real difficulty. There was a particular scene on television two nights ago where a woman was asking where her prime minister was? Her pension and retirement are devastated. Where is the government? The truth of the matter is that the government is missing in action on this file. It has proposed no legislation whatsoever with respect to pension protection.
While the hon. member has proposed Bill C-290, which may be in and of itself be a flawed bill, it is probably a greater response than we have received from the government in the four years in which it has been the government.
I do commend the hon. parliamentary secretary for his work in this area. I know that he has engaged others in this conversation, but having engaged others in this conversation is too little, too late. The pensions of Canadians melted down last year and a lot of them have not come back. It is very sad and difficult.
While Rome literally burns, the government fiddles. We have no comprehensive response to either the Nortel people or others. When questions are raised on this side of the House, the Minister of Industry says that it is a provincial problem. As a consequence, the government says that it is washing its hands of it and that it is just too bad for the folks who do not have pensions.
People put in 30 to 35 years of work at a particular company and they are set to enjoy their retirement, but they are out of luck. That is the sad state of affairs in our country and it is a sad state of affairs with respect to the government's response to the pension crisis that is happening in this country.
The bill itself raises a number of interesting difficulties. I suppose that our party is in the position of saying that it is probably worth going to committee, even though we know full well that it will require a royal recommendation and that this bill will never receive royal assent. Nevertheless, it does raise some interesting questions.
The first question has to do with the government funding shortfalls of pensions. The concept of the bill is that if an employer does not contribute the proportion that he, she or it is supposed to contribute to the pension plan that year, the taxpaying employee will receive, in this case, a refundable tax credit, which is the operative difficulty. Effectively, that means that the employee of company A, which does not contribute, will get a tax credit. However, the employee of company B, which does contribute, will not receive a tax credit.
This brings us into a kind of moral hazard, slippery slope argument. The problem is that the government, or the taxpayer in this case, is effectively bailing out companies that do not contribute to pension plans for whatever reason. That in and of itself is a difficulty because we should not encourage competition among companies in the same industry to not contribute.
For example, let me use companies A, B and C. Companies B and C contribute to pension plans and are therefore draining their own capital. Company A does not contribute. Companies B and C are actually at a competitive disadvantage with company A, all at the cost of the taxpayer of Canada. That is a fairly significant flaw. I commend the hon. member for bringing this legislation forward, but that is a difficulty that is problematic for those of us on the committee that would look at this legislation. I do not know whether the member anticipated this difficulty.
The second difficulty I see with the bill is that it would only deal with people who have pensions. I am given to understand that something in the order of 70% of Canadians do not have pensions. Therefore, taxpayers are contributing to a pension plan out of taxpayer-funded dollars where 70% of those same taxpayers have no plan at all. The no plan taxpayer is contributing to the plan taxpayer. While we would like to redress all of the inequities in this world, this does not seem to me to be quite fair to those who fund their retirement through RRSPs or investments of some kind or another.
It is a bit difficult to rationalize to constituents of mine who have lived in their houses for 35 years, have worked, have no pension, and have lived frugally, to contribute to this pension through their tax dollars. That is a difficulty in itself.
Those are two of the difficulties that I would raise with the bill independent of the requirement for a royal recommendation.
Just for the purposes of those who may or may not understand what a royal recommendation is, a private member's bill cannot cause the Government of Canada to spend money. Any private member's bill has to be shaped and framed so that it does not cause an expenditure out of the treasury.
Having made your ruling, Madam Speaker, and having given us fair warning that this legislation would require a royal recommendation, means that when a vote takes place and if the vote is positive and the bill ends up in committee, there is a very slim likelihood that it will emerge from committee.
On the face of it, I again commend the hon. member for his diligence in putting the bill forward, but in addition to the royal recommendation problem it does seem to have some flaws which would make it difficult. Nonetheless, the bill is an attempt on the part of a private member to address issues relating to pensions. I am rather saddened that we are not looking at comprehensive legislation from the government to deal with what is really a pension crisis in this country.