Mr. Speaker, as I was saying earlier, if the government were really interested in securing retirement income and pensions for its citizens, it would do what the Liberal government did when we looked at the Canada pension plan and secured it for 75 years. We did not send it off to some private sector to look after, but decided it was really important. Because that Canada pension plan is secure now, I would want to know why the government would not look at expanding the Canada pension plan to meet the needs of seniors for their retirement. It could look, for instance, at people who are in the non-paid work force and expand it to them, so that instead of their having to depend on OAS only, they would get a CPP pension down the road. This is the kind of creative thinking that the Conservative government does not seem to care about.
It is easy to dump on seniors. It is easy to cut whatever they are hoping for in the next few years, and there are going to be a lot of people in this House who are going to suffer the consequences of this. If the government were really interested in looking at changes that would benefit seniors and, at the same time, in looking for sustainability in the system, what it would do is to look at the evidence. The CPP is a good example and expanding it might be a good way to go. Let us look at the evidence of Australia, which has, for a decade, this same kind of pooled pension with private sector and insurance and financial institutions running it. After 10 years the Australians discovered that the financial institutions were the only ones that benefited from it.
So did the government listen to the evidence? Does it look at evidence when it is talking about the way to help Canadians? Does it listen to experts? We have the economist Don Drummond saying that if we are going to increase the retirement age by two years, it is going to have a severe domino effect on the workplace across all economic sectors and that it should take about 20 years to phase in. However, the Conservative government does not listen to the experts or to evidence. It is manufacturing a crisis when the OECD and the World Bank has said that there is none.
Here is what the government might be able to do to help Canadians save for retirement. Instead of making the already-rich financial and insurance sectors richer, it might want to look at a non-profit way of doing this. We have been told by the OECD that here in Canada we are one of the lowest contributors to a public pension plan. So here is a way that the government could contribute to the public pension plan if it does not like the CPP idea and if it wanted to look at a non-profit way of doing this. It could do it and it would help a lot of people who are trying to put aside money for retirement.
The argument is that people will be asked to voluntarily save in a private sector plan when they are the same people who do not have RRSPs because they do not have the money to put into them. So where would those savings come from? This is a non-starter. It is a no-brainer. It does not make any logical sense at all.
All I have to think is that it is part of the game. The government says it wants to double the rate at which it pays off its deficit, so it is doing it on the backs of the people who it thinks are the least likely to give it a hard time. The government is doing it on the backs of people like veterans, as we have heard earlier, because we know that the veterans who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder are not getting any help from the government. We know that the veterans are having a huge problem with being given a lump sum pension, not knowing how long they will live and how long it will last them, which is putting stress on the people who fought for us. We also look at the fact that the government is cutting health care funding without considering whether that is the appropriate thing to do. Is that an investment in productivity or are jails an investment in productivity, unless, of course, building jails is the government's way of looking at a housing and mental health strategy.
However, the problem here is that good fiscal management, if they are talking about deficit reduction, should be looked at from an evidence base and should not be done on the backs of the most vulnerable. One should look at where one cuts and where one invests. An investment means putting money into programs that will reap, down the road, good jobs and economic prosperity to be shared by everyone. This does not do that. We have seen the government make bad choices with its fiscal management of this country, and so this is something we want to talk about.
When the government says there is a crisis, I would point out that OAS costs 2.4% of GDP today. When the number of baby boomers reaches its maximum in 2031, OAS will cost 3.2% of GDP, and that cost will then begin to drop. So tell me where this crisis is? When is it going to occur? It does not seem that it will occur for a long time.
Therefore, as the government looks at ways to become fiscally sensible and prudent, it should look at evidence and try very hard not to cut the things that will in fact assist people and their quality of life. If pensioners do not have strong retirement incomes, they will need more health care. This does not make sense.
It is about logic. It is about making good financial decisions. However, the government shows that it is incapable of doing any of those things.