Madam Speaker, look at these bonuses for the CPP board executives. David Denison, the CEO, earned $2.3 million in bonuses. These are mind-boggling numbers for an average working person in Canada. Mark Wiseman earned $2.1 million, Donald Raymond earned $1.2 million and Graeme Eadie earned $1 million.
I can guarantee that average voters are not aware of this. They think that the government is managing their funds properly. If they were to find out that the government set up the board back in 1997, hired these private investment people to run it and then gave them $300,000 salaries with bonuses on top of that, they would be ready to vote the government out of office right away.
If the government does not do something about it, try to get this money back and at least make some effort here, I think that is going to happen. People are really going to be outraged when they get this information and they understand what it all means.
I am not sure how much time I have left. I want to mention that three or four years ago, a New York newspaper set up a contest. It had a number of stockbrokers picking out stocks against a monkey. This went on for a month or a month and a half. I think the stockbrokers won once or twice, but at the end of the day, they lost the contest to the monkey.
After three or four years, they decided to try this again. They thought they might get a smarter monkey the second time around. Guess what happened again? The stockbrokers lost a second time. That should say something about how predictable markets can be and how so-called expertise in markets does not always work out.
As a matter of fact, the whole system is set up for sales. It really does not have a lot to do with return on investments as much as it does with trying to sell a product. That is what we are dealing with here. The government has been taken in by this whole idea that private investments gurus were going to turn water into wine and produce excellent returns, which by the way is not hard to do when the market is coming up. All of us can do that.
I have some personal experience with a number of people who got caught up in buying equities over the last few years. I will not mention specifically which pension plan it is, but I did come from the Manitoba legislature, so one could probably figure it out. After about 10 years, I do not think there was a single person in that plan who had all the money he started with.
These are people who are supposed to know better. They are supposed to have an idea about investments, yet they are going to the high-priced help to make investments for them.
This is a mess. The government should do something about trying to get itself out of it. If it does not want to do that, fine—