Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take a moment to join in this debate. I appreciate the comments from my colleague from Windsor. I too learned a great deal about not only the process through which this bill found its way back again to us but also some of the issues they have been wrestling with at committee, which would in fact perhaps have benefited this bill had the conclusions they came to found their way into the bill.
The point I would like to ask him to expand upon is one that has come to my attention as a labour leader, and that is that more and more often, we have to admit that white collar crime is in fact a blue collar issue. Over 60% of all the trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the TSE and the NASDAQ is actually employee benefit plans, investing and reinvesting workers' money on the stock exchange.
In a funny kind of way, unions' pension plans and benefits plans are the most powerful stock of venture capital or capital or investment in the world. An odd kind of thing has happened. It is like Marxism realized. We have taken over the means of production without a single shot fired. We have bought and paid for it with our own benefit plans. It is a beautiful thing, when we think about, but the vulnerability is there. What I want my colleague to talk about is that perhaps it is going to take a great deal more training for the trustees of these multibillion dollar benefit plans.
My own union is a small union, the carpenters' union. It has a $40 billion pension plan, and the trustees have to be aware of the vagaries of the marketplace, above and beyond, in a way like never before. First of all, there are the fiduciary responsibilities and obligations associated with being a trustee. One cannot just take a guy off the shop floor and put him in charge of a $40 billion pension plan. There is also the vulnerability of it to the new generation of white collar criminal who could eat it away.
That is what I mean by the blue collar side of white collar crime, on which I would like my colleague to expand.