Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-501, which was introduced by my colleague. He has analyzed the problem correctly and I think that he is introducing the remedy that is required for the moment.
It is amazing to me that we have found ourselves in this place, given what we and our parents have gone through since the Great Depression of 1929 and on. Our parents went through the Great Depression and came out of it. It took perhaps 30 years for the stock market to recover. By that time, anyone who held stocks was likely to find that the companies they held the stocks in were never to come back.
One would have thought, given the situation out of that recession, that people would have thought ahead and come to the conclusion that we had to work out an insurance scheme for the retirement plans themselves. It only makes sense. If we look at historical records, we will find that companies rarely last for huge amounts of time. We have situations where consumer tastes change. We have obsolescence in companies. Just plain bad management of companies leads companies to fall into tough times.
Workers and their representatives had an undying trust that they would somehow put their money into a pension plan and be able to have the benefits last until the end of their lives. This trust came at a time when there was a lot of optimism on the part of the workers. I also think that when young workers start, they rarely question the pension plan. Whether they are in unions or not, I think most people will agree that it is only when people get to be middle age that they really start to take a deep interest and question what their pension plans are all about and whether the money is going to be there.
Previous speakers have indicated already that we have a patchwork quilt of pension benefits across the country. I believe that only 33% of people have taken advantage of the RRSP program. Only another rather small percentage of people actually have a company pension. Of those, some have the defined benefit plans. Those have peaked and they are not increasing in numbers at all. If anything, they are decreasing over time. Those are the best plans, the Cadillac plans, that came around in the 1950s and 1960s. Those are more or less at an end in terms of their expansion.
Now we are seeing the defined contribution plan taking over. That type of plan is not as good as the defined benefit plans were. Through all of this, I fail to see why successive governments and workers' organizations themselves were not calling for an insurance plan for pension plans as early as the 1960s, knowing what we know can happen and does happen over time to the economy. I can point out other industries that have formed their own compensation plans or insurance plans.
All we have to do is look at the P and C, property and casualty, insurance companies. In 1987, I believe, after several bankruptcies of small P and C companies in Canada, the industry realized that this was bad for business to have a house insurance company go bankrupt and leave people stuck without having the claims paid and the premiums not returned. I could mention some names of some companies, but I will not do that now. It was a long process and at the end of it the companies decided this was a big enough risk that they got together with the governments, or vice versa, and they formed a pool. The P and C companies now have a pool so that if someone's house insurance company goes bankrupt and goes out of business, this pool steps in and there is an orderly wind-down of the company and the policies. As a matter of fact, it is so painless that the public does not even notice it is happening.
The same is true of the life insurance industry. It has a similar type of pooling structure. We have had travel acts in Ontario, in Quebec and in B.C. now for a number of years. Consumers in those provinces know, when they buy airline tickets, that if their agency or tour operator goes bankrupt, like Conquest Vacations did last February, that they are protected. There are provinces like my own, Manitoba, that do not have their own travel fund. They are not protected at all, but the consumers in Ontario, Quebec and B.C. are.
I was at a Canada-U.S. conference in New Orleans on the weekend. We were given a briefing on the oil spill on Sunday morning. They talked about the potential for the worst-case scenario and there is a fund set up for a limited liability of $100 million for oil spills, and the companies pay into this fund. Of course, if there is a case of an oil spill that exceeds the amount, or if the liability is determined that the company was negligent, of course it could be unlimited liability.
Potentially a company like BP, very healthy only a few weeks ago, might end up in a bankruptcy situation in the future. All the shareholders who thought things were going fine two weeks ago would lose their money, and the workers at BP would be in a similar situation to some of the workers we are looking at here, such as those from Nortel.
These are not isolated examples. They happen in the economy all the time, so the question is: Why can we not look forward and take precautions when we know it is going to happen? We are going to have workers who have paid into pension plans for many years and through no fault of their own are going to have a deficiency in what they can draw.
Bear in mind that the workers are not running the companies. It is the management that is running the companies. It is management that is making the bad business decisions that get companies occasionally into trouble. Then we have a situation when the company is going into bankruptcy, when the management ends up looking after itself. It was mentioned by the previous speaker that Canwest is an example. Management took $41 million to take care of itself.
The public gets outraged when it sees that happen. I know the member for Winnipeg Centre is listening right now and I can just see a speech starting to develop over this issue, because people see this happening. They see that management takes care of itself and the workers are the ones who are left holding the bag.
It is time we passed this bill and moved the workers to the front of the line.