Madam Speaker, I have no doubt that some of my colleagues will speak more directly about the Liberal failures and the problems with the bill, but I want to focus today on an issue affecting more than 2,800 people in my riding and thousands more people across Canada, which is the frozen pensions of British Canadians.
For 75 years, the U.K. has refused to provide annual increases to the state pensions of British retirees living in Canada. More than 105,000 pensioners already face this injustice, with hundreds of thousands more Canadians aging into it. They paid into the U.K. national insurance system their entire lives. They earned their pensions.
However, because they moved to Canada, a Commonwealth ally, their pensions are frozen at the amount first received, in some cases decades ago. If they had moved to the United States, to Israel or to the Philippines, they would receive their annual increases. About 60% of British pensioners living overseas get their annual increases, but 40% do not. It is a lottery that is based not on contribution or need but on geography, and Canadians are inexplicably on the losing end of this.
The U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions admits that fixing the problem for British retirees in Canada would cost only about 13 million British pounds, which is about $24 million, of a total U.K. pension budget of 146 billion pounds. Therefore this is not a question of cost; it is a question of will.
I have met pensioners in their seventies, eighties and nineties surviving on payments at levels set in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Canada honours its obligations to our pensioners living in the U.K. by indexing their pensions. The upshot is that Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing a moral failure by one of our oldest allies.
The world has changed, our trade has certainly changed and our lives have changed; however, this unfair policy remains. The U.K. remains the only OECD country that pays pensioners differently based on where they live. It is an outdated, discriminatory relic from another era.
Successive MPs from my community have raised this issue over the last decade. The House has passed motions. Past Canadian governments have asked the U.K. to reopen discussions on this issue. The U.K.'s pensions minister has said no every time, which seems to be a pattern in Liberal trade negotiations.
Meanwhile, the U.K. has signed new reciprocal social service agreements with Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, but not with Canada, a country that stood shoulder to shoulder with it through wars, through peacekeeping and through generations of shared sacrifices. This is not how friends treat each other.
This is where partnership really matters. If the U.K. wants to benefit from the CPTPP, then it should also act like a partner, by honouring fairness, reciprocity and human dignity. It is a conundrum, yet I cannot help but think, “if only”. If only we had a prime minister with deep connections to the United Kingdom, someone who understands economics, banking and pensions. Wait a minute; I seem to recall that our current Prime Minister is not only a former governor of the Bank of England but also the man who arranged for the King to deliver the throne speech of this very Parliament.
The Prime Minister may be friends with kings, but he has failed the commoners on this issue. The Prime Minister waxes poetic about transformational change and extols generational investments and structural reforms, but if he truly wanted to be transformational, he would start with this generation: the seniors who built the country he once served and who now suffer under an unfair, outdated policy. If the Prime Minister cares, if he wants to show that his talk about values and fairness is more than just a slogan, he should use his connections to fix this, because it is a burning issue for British seniors who have chosen Canada as their home.
The Prime Minister needs to understand that transformational leadership does not just happen in jets or hotel lobbies, or swanning around English parties. It happens when we stand up for real people who are being left behind. I ask the Prime Minister to come down from on high to see these people, the British pensioners of Nanaimo, Ladysmith, Vancouver Island and from across Canada, whose income has not risen in 30 years. Some of them split pills. Some skip meals. All of them deserve our help. They are the people who built the very democracy that allows us to debate the bill today.
If the Prime Minister had a functioning constituency office in his riding, he would know that this is an issue that affects his community too. If the Prime Minister truly believes in fairness, he should pick up the phone. He should call his old colleagues in London. He should call the King and explain the issue as I have, and put it back on the agenda. He should pursue justice and get a deal.
The Canadian Alliance of British Pensioners has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the issue. The pensioners are not asking Canada for new spending; they are asking for their government to negotiate justice for them from the United Kingdom.
The CPTPP is about rules-based trade and mutual benefit. Let it now show that it is also about fairness, reciprocity and moral responsibility.
I want to close with this. The 2,845 people with frozen pensions in Nanaimo—Ladysmith, and the thousands more across Vancouver Island and the rest of Canada, have not been forgotten. Their government may not always fight for them, but today I lend them my voice and this platform for their cause. They worked hard, they played by the rules and they deserve justice.
The Prime Minister has the relationships, the platform and an immense amount of privilege. He should use it and bring the issue to the fore in his discussions with the U.K. He should raise it at every level, because justice is not measured in economic models or global summits. It is measured in the lives of real people, in this case the thousands of Canadians who are also British pensioners, who chose Canada to be their home, against their own self-interest, and who deserve our support in remedying this injustice.