Mr. Speaker, over 60% of Canadians have no workplace pension. That is because many employers do not want the legal or administrative burden of offering them. These costs can be prohibitively high and the benefits inordinately low for a small business with a limited budget and only five or ten employees.
Let us consider or create an example. Joe and Martha Stephens are a married couple without a pension plan. He owns a corner store and she works as a restaurant manager. Neither the restaurant nor the corner store has enough employees to justify the cost of running a pension plan for its people. It is true that RRSPs help as an option, but some people find them too intimidating or time consuming to establish. On average, each Canadian has about $18,000 in unused RRSP room.
What if thousands of Canadian workers from these kinds of businesses could pool their benefits together to achieve the bulk-buy savings that come with a pooled plan? That would spread the risks and costs among a larger number of people. That is exactly what the pooled registered pension plan offers. Canadians would be able to buy in bulk and get better purchasing power. All of a sudden, the Joes and Marthas and millions of people like them who are on their own could join forces and secure affordable pensions. The design of these plans will be straightforward with simple enrolment and management. A third-party administrator, normally a bank, insurance company or existing pension plan, would be responsible for the administrative and legal duties.
What a relief for a small business owner. These plans would also be subject to the standard pension rules that exist for plans across the sector right now, unlike group RRSPs, which have no similar standard of regulatory practice.
The opposition parties oppose this idea because it is a private sector solution. They believe that government should run and operate everything. They particularly oppose the fact that these pooled pension plans would invest in the stock market. What they fail to realize is that the entire pension system, public and private, relies heavily on the stock market already. Consider the Canada pension plan, 49.6% of which is invested in equities or stocks. These stocks can only pay income into the CPP out of their after-tax profits. Liberals and the NDP want to raise taxes on the very businesses that the CPP invests in. The result would be increased pressures on our public pension system.
For example, the CPP owns $59 million in Bank of Nova Scotia shares. When that company profits, so does the CPP and, ultimately, so do the millions of Canadians who rely upon it. The CPP also owns $13 million in TransCanada shares. Does TransCanada ring bells in this place? I ask because TransCanada is the same company that is attempting to build the Keystone pipeline, which, admittedly, would profit that company but would, by definition, also profit its owners of whom $13 million is represented by the Canada pension plan and the 17 million Canadians who are invested in that plan. The opposition, which opposes this pipeline, is attacking a company that is literally paying its profits into the CPP fund.
The opposition parties are also attacking workplace pension plans, even though they do not realize they are doing so. Take the Canada Post pension plan. During the debate over the postal strike, members of the New Democratic Party simultaneously demanded that the existing pension plan for mail workers be bolstered and that business taxes go up. These concurrent demands are painfully ironic.
The top five holdings of the Canada Post pension plan are the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia, Suncor and Canadian Natural Resources. The banks and oil companies, the twin villains in every left-wing storyline, paid dividends into the pension fund of these unionized workers. These dividends come exclusively from after-tax profits. That means that if we tax these profits more, pensioners will ultimately get less.
On January 1, 2012 the final instalment of our business tax cuts took effect, dropping the rate from 15% to 22%. That is a one-third reduction. By contrast, the NDP election platform proposed increasing the business tax rate from 15% to 19.5%, a one-third hike. That would be a $9 billion tax increase on job creators, the companies in which pension funds are invested. Liberals propose a similar hike on these job creators. That would drastically reduce the after-tax earnings left to the pension funds that own these shares.
We should celebrate the fact that workers are invested in capital markets. It is good for everyone involved. People grow their retirement savings while their money provides investment capital to companies that create jobs.
However, the benefit is not just economic but also societal. Politicians always like to divide people along socio-economic class lines, the workers versus capitalists. However, the two are increasingly becoming one and the same due to direct or indirect share ownership by workers. The old utopian socialist dream was for workers to become owners of the means of production through a process of forced collectivization, nationalization and expropriation.
In an ironic twist of fate, it was the capitalistic stock market and not the state that made workers into business owners. Pooled pension plans, tax free savings accounts, lower taxes on businesses and workers give Canadians ownership over their own destinies. Herein lies the sharp difference between this side of the House and that side. Members on that side want to turn workers against business owners; we want to turn workers into business owners. That is the hopeful, uplifting message that our government offers Canadians who aspire to a brighter, more secure and prosperous future.