Ken Epp

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

What about the Liberals?

[Criminal Code, June 14th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have a very brief question. In the course of her speech the hon. member indicated that hers was the only party that had the lives and the well-being of Canadians at heart. Anybody in the House knows that is inaccurate. I would like to give the member the opportunity to correct the record and to say that she is one of many, in fact probably all MPs, who have that interest.

[Criminal Code, June 14th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to lend my support to this very important bill.

I think we can get lost in statistics and they can become very impersonal. However, I will never forget the day that one of my colleagues at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, where I worked, phoned to say that he would not be coming to work that day because his sister had just been killed. It turned out that she had been killed by a drunken driver. I believe she was 18 years old at the time.

When something like that happens, we realize that this is something that is very serious and something that we must take great action to stop. As the parliamentary secretary just said, we probably cannot pass laws that will eliminate this totally. What we need is a massive overhaul of public attitude toward this.

It should be an automatic given that if a person is impaired, or anywhere near impaired, that they decline to drive. There is always another way of getting from point A to point B if they are not able to drive.

I remember one day—and this person probably does not remember who did it to him—I was driving behind a driver who literally was bouncing off the curbs where there were three lanes in the road. He was going from one side to another. I was heading out into the country where my family lives, and he was going onto a two lane country road. Fortunately, the very last light before he left the town that I was in was red. I pulled up behind him, threw on my four-way flashers, jumped out of my car, ran up, opened the door and took his keys away. He was very surprised. In a way, I guess, I made a citizen's arrest. Maybe I could get charged for doing something illegal now.

However, I always think that perhaps what I did that day was not only to save him the anguish of knowing that he had injured or killed someone, but that I had also saved the life of some person who could have been his victim. I knew that I had to do that.

As parliamentarians, today we have the opportunity to strengthen the law with respect to impaired driving. This is a bill which I believe is long overdue. It is a very important bill. We must send a crystal clear message to people who contemplate driving when they are impaired that it is something they just do not do because the risks are too high.

I just thought of an example, Mr. Speaker. You just mentioned that your grandchildren were watching on television. The government whip just said that it was his twin grandkids' birthday today. I have four grandchildren. None of us would have a place, say a catwalk in a store, where we would take away some of the railing that prevents kids from falling down and hurting themselves. If that railing was broken, we would block that place off and not allow anyone to go there until the risk was removed.

Here we have an opportunity to remove the risk or at least reduce it, thereby saving lives and saving the anguish of those people who go through life knowing that they have taken someone else's life.

This bill is long overdue. As I have said, I would like to give a little credit to our colleague from Prince George—Bulkley Valley, who has headed up the campaign to improve the law in the area of impaired driving. I would like to give him accolades for having done that.

We have a responsibility to the victims of impaired driving to legislate this very important amendment to the criminal code. This is an amendment that will give judges the means of imposing a life sentence for impaired driving causing death, a very serious crime.

I support this bill and I am fairly certain that all of my colleagues in the Alliance support it as well. We call on all parliamentarians to support the legislation. We urge the government and the Senate to pass it quickly. Let us not have the same thing with this bill as we had with the consecutive sentencing bill.

Because this bill has been such a long time coming and Canadians can wait for it no longer, I would, therefore, like to move:

That the question be now put.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I want to take a few minutes to be on record at third reading of the bill. I greatly regret what is happening in the House these days. We should be debating what is good for Canadian taxpayers and we find that distant party over there has used pretty well all of the time to spread misinformation about us and to try to make political points in a very cheap way. That is very unfortunate and I also found it very hurtful. The things they said about me are things which are just not accurate. It reminds of the 1997 election campaign.

I will say this. In the 1993 election campaign the Conservative who was the sitting member of parliament was a real gentleman. He was a really good man. When we had the all-candidate debates in the different fora he was a real gentleman. He was thoughtful and considerate. I do not hesitate for a moment to give him, Mr. Brian O'Kurley, great accolades for the way he conducted himself.

Somehow the party which was defeated and annihilated in 1993 decided to use the approach of attacking people viscerally and personally. That was why the Conservative candidate in the 1997 election, whom I will not name, said things about me which anyone who knew knew were not true. They were just not true. When he said these things publicly on one occasion I remember I stood up and said at a meeting, “Mr. Chairman, anyone who knows me knows that what this candidate has said about me is untrue. Why should they consider even voting for a person who has so little regard for the truth?” As a matter of fact, that Conservative candidate did not even get his deposit back because people saw through that.

Earlier this evening things were attributed to me that I take personally because they were attributed to me as a member of the Canadian Alliance, formerly the Reform Party. Publicly and loudly the members of that distant party put me into a category which is frankly not true.

I came here with great ideals. I believed then and I believe now, that the MP pension, because it exceeded what was available to other Canadians under the Income Tax Act rules, was excessively generous. Very frankly, for them to say these things is very demeaning and I was hurt by it when they spoke that way.

Be that as it may, I guess one cannot be in this business and not expect to be falsely accused occasionally. However, I would like to say unequivocally that I have been committed for the last seven years and continue to be committed to bringing into this place a pension plan which a person of honour can participate in without shame. I do not believe that we are there yet.

It is important for me to also say that this plan is particularly bad for me because I decided in 1995 to opt out of the other plan. I have been making contributions to an RRSP. I am trying to organize my financial life so my wife and I will not be on welfare when we finally retire. This particular plan is a real dilemma for me. As soon as this plan is brought into place, money will be taken from my paycheque without my ability to stop it which will thereby take away my RRSP deposit room. I find that distressing because I had hoped to do it that way.

It was not my choice to change this system and plan. To be falsely accused that I wanted it and that I want back in is hurtful, harmful and simply is not true. I think it is unbecoming of the members who have made those accusations.

Nonetheless, it is almost midnight. I am on the record as saying that I am opposed to it and that I will vote against the bill again, as I did earlier. This is being done against my will. I want that to be clearly on the record. Very frankly, my integrity is not for sale and I really regret that even that implication is being made.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I think I will make a comment. Very frankly I do not require a response from the member. I would like to point out to everyone who happens to be listening to the debate that in fact the then Reform Party, which is now the Canadian Alliance, was the only party that ever both publicly and privately said it would do something to try to make this pension plan fairer for Canadian taxpayers at the same time as giving a commitment to fix it for everyone. As far as I am concerned we will form government.

The member can bray all he wants about how we are such terrible guys, but we are the only ones that have ever done anything about it. All other members, including those on that side, have always very happily taken whatever they could get without ever questioning whether or not it is fair.

We will continue to question the fairness of it. I will personally. We need to work on it until we get it right. Right now there are some changes being proposed in this bill. As far as I am concerned they do not yet fix it. The work is not yet finished. With that I end my comments. As I said, no response is needed, nor required, nor wanted.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I stand in my place to speak to an issue which I think is very important to Canadian taxpayers and voters. It is the whole issue of how we manage their money. I talk a lot about this because I am on the finance committee. Over and over I have been on record as saying that we should give Canadian taxpayers a break. It is time that we reduced their taxes.

Here we are on a Monday evening in June debating the change in the pension plan.

I have not had a great amount of time to look at the bill since we only got it today. It has been a bit of a rush job. From what I see, like most bills we get here, parts of the bill have some gravel mixed in with the tapioca pudding. Some things are probably necessary and should be done and then there are a few things that perhaps are beyond what should be done. I will try to put this into perspective from my own point of view.

I have heard several members say that there is no Canadian who thinks that members of parliament should not have a pension. I am not sure that is accurate. Some people I have talked to have said that they do not get a pension so why should we. There are some who think we should get no pension at all from the taxpayer. Some others have quite the opposite view. Some say they know how hard we work. They know how many hours we put in and therefore, we should have a pension. Some people have even said to me that they think I am a fool to have opted out. So be it; that is their opinion.

One lady even told me she would not vote for me again because if I was that stupid not to take a pension, I must lack intelligence in other areas too. I told her that was her choice. I made that choice because I believed it was the right thing to do at the time. I found out later that she had been kidding and had a great deal of admiration for a politician who finally acted on principle and actually put his money where his mouth was. But it has been a real personal dilemma.

I do not think that in making speeches here tonight we are going to elicit a whole bunch of sympathy from the taxpaying public no matter what we say or do. I have an idea that two-thirds of Canadians have no pension plan other than what they provide for themselves. If that is the case, then we need to be rather discreet in how we describe our work. I am not trying to elicit any sympathy but it is important to put some facts on the table.

I worked at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology for a number of years. Tonight while some of the other members were speaking I did a quick calculation. I was in that pension plan. I have not yet taken my pension. I have not yet retired from NAIT in the sense of actually receiving my pension payments. I did go through the retirement procedure so I could be replaced by a permanent staff member instead of perpetual temporary staff. I thought it would be fair to that person. But I have not yet begun taking my pension.

My pension at NAIT is rather mediocre, if I dare say it, in the sense that the politicians of the day in Alberta made themselves a very good pension, but did not make a very good one for the civil servants. Our pension plan is actually reduced by the amount of Canada pension plan. Basically my contributions to the Canada pension plan are just a gift to the Government of Canada since whatever I get from the Canada pension plan is the same amount by which my pension from the provincial government plan is going to be reduced. So that is not a great deal of money here.

I thought about the salary. I did a quick calculation and my gross salary at NAIT when I quit was around $24 an hour. That was before deductions. We all know after deductions that is about $12 per hour. I made about $24 an hour.

Many people think that having left NAIT to become a member of parliament I am rolling in the dough. I again did a quick calculation and based on my salary here, I make $16 an hour. Of course, I make a lot more money because I have the privilege in this job of working easily 80 hours per week, whereas at NAIT even though we were required to work 36 hours per week, I usually only worked about 55 hours per week.

My hourly rate of wage is down and that is just a fact. I am not trying to elicit sympathy. It is a choice I made. Very frankly I have to admit that at the time when I decided to run for parliament I did not compute that. As a matter of fact it was after my nomination or perhaps just shortly before when somebody asked me what my salary would be. I said that I had better check that out.

I was always under the impression that MPs got paid lots and so I had not paid any great amount of attention to what the pay actually was. I discovered that is was about 15% higher than what I was making at NAIT so I thought it would be okay. However I no idea of the amount of the expenses in this job and what it costs to be a member of parliament. Again those are just the facts.

Having given up the growth in my pension at NAIT, I came here and I was upset because there were some critic groups, people such as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and others, who had drawn a great amount of attention to the MP pension plan. They called it the gold-plated plan and everything else. I looked into and, sure enough, there were some aspects of the pension plan available to members of parliament that were actually somewhat offensive. I found several things really offensive.

First, in order for me to collect 70% of my salary, including Canada pension, when I worked at NAIT I would have had to work for 35 years. Thirty-five years of service at 2% per year, which was the rate of accrual, gave me 70% of my salary. As I said earlier, the amount we earn from Canada pension is taken away from that pension so it is not really even a full 70%. That is after 35 years of work.

Then I looked at the MP pension plan and I found that MPs would be eligible for 75% of their salary on retirement if they had worked for 15 years. To me that seemed a little high. For the Liberal members who just came in and do not realize what I was talking about, this was before the revisions to the plan, when it was still at a 5% accrual rate.

I was then told that the Income Tax Act did not permit ordinary participating pension plans to accrue at more than 2% per year and that in the federal government a special law was passed by MPs and senators that basically exempted them from the Income Tax Act. I felt that was wrong. It was not right for members of parliament and senators not to have the whole law apply to them as it applies to every other Canadian.

After I was elected in 1993 I went to the payroll office and asked if I could opt out of the pension plan. I was told that I could not. It is an act of parliament and I was required to participate in it. If I remember correctly, about $590 per month in contributions would be taken off my paycheque before I ever got it and I was in it whether or not I wanted to be,

I know that some of my colleagues at that time actually filed a letter saying that they wished to be exempted from the plan and not participate in it. I did not file a letter. I did it verbally. When it was denied I said “If you are going to take my money anyway, I guess there is nothing I can do about it”. As a new member of parliament trying to get two offices organized, staff members hired, learning the ropes in a brand new job and everything else, I did not have a great deal of time to work on that part of it.

We know the history of it. About two years later for fairly political reasons the Liberal government decided that it did not like all this criticism of the MP pension plan and said that it would call the bluff of those MPs. In a piece of legislation it offered us the opportunity to opt out. It said that it would get us to stop criticizing the MP pension plan by having half of us opt out and the other half stay in. It would cause dissension in the ranks and that would be the end of it. Then it could have its MP pension plan and live happily ever after.

Imagine the government's surprise when 51 of 52 on this side opted out. I did so on principle. It was an individual decision. I was asked “What about the one who opted to stay in? What is going on? You guys are divided”. I said “No, it is the strength of our party. We are not told what to say. We are not told what to think. We are certainly not told how to act in our party”. This was an individual decision. The fact that 51 out of 52 opted out voluntarily without coercion from anyone else is a mark of what principled people we are.

I was very proud at that time to opt out and decided to make the best of it. At that stage we had that opportunity. We got back our contributions into the MP pension plan minus income tax, which meant that we got a very small amount of money after tax. Some of us were able to roll that back into an RRSP.

I started contributing to an RRSP as my way of supplementing my living after I retire. That has been sort of a difficult thing to do. Other members have been enrolled in the MP plan. They contribute approximately $590 or $600 a month into a very generous plan. I did a little computation and found out that if I wanted to give myself the same benefits they are getting, because of my age and not having enough time for the money to grow with interest, I would have to put about $3,000 a month into an RRSP. That is not permitted under the Income Tax Act so I cannot do that, besides which I could not afford it.

I therefore have kept on making payments of around $600 a month into my RRSP just as before. This is one of the big reasons I will be voting against the bill now before the House. If I decide that I want to continue to contribute to my RRSP because of the fact that my total savings for the future are not that great, with the plan before us today I shall lose all my RRSP room or the bulk of it.

I am not ready today to announce whether or not I will be running in the election following the next one. I have already stated publicly that I plan on running again in the election this fall or next spring, but after that perhaps I would like to see some younger guy come in and represent Elk Island with all the energy that he could bring to the job.

If that is the case, I would get only my contributions back because I will not have put in the six years under the plan that we are speaking about today. In the meantime, for the next six years I will lose my RRSP room so I will be able to do even less in terms of looking after myself.

I think it is not a well thought out plan. I am against it on that account. I am also against it on the account that it still provides for members of parliament and senators benefits which are not available to ordinary Canadians.

I believe that if ordinary Canadians can accrue 2% per annum on their pensions then so should members of parliament. That should be the limit. Really in a sense the plan before us is simply a way of deferring the tax on a fair amount of income.

I did a little calculation. If one looks at just the contributions into an annuity to provide similar plans, we would have to put in, depending on the age of the person and how many years he or she will pay in, anything between $1,700 a month and $2,500 a month. That is an eight year plan. When I did my original calculations of $3,000 a month it was on the assumption that I would be a member of parliament for four years.

The fact of the matter is that it is not really possible for a person to contribute enough into an RRSP with the present RRSP rules. I think what should be done is very simple. We should have a system whereby the amount that members of parliament and senators contribute to their future retirement plans is within the same limits as those provided to and restricting ordinary members of the public.

I also want to take a bit of a swipe at the the taxpayers association. I have tried to talk to it about one of the things that has bothered me over the years, but I have not been able to get together with the association. Now that I have said it in the House I imagine that my phone will ring tomorrow, but it has not rung when I phoned before and it has not returned my calls.

I have tried to get them to actually admit publicly that the difference between what one contributes into the plan and what one gets out is not all coming from the taxpayer per se. Some of it could appropriately be called interest on one's contributions.

I think that by and large the taxpayers association has failed to take that into account. It has simply added up the total amount of the benefits, and that is what it has put on its billboards along the highways. Since I am a mathematician of sorts and I know the math of finance, I have always felt that was intellectually dishonest of the association. It has not served Canadians well by giving them that misinformation.

It is true that it is still too rich compared to what is contributed, even if one matched dollar for dollar on behalf of the employer the taxpayers of the country. It is still richer, but it is not rich by the amount the association claims. For example, if people contribute $1,700 a month to an RRSP or to a growth annuity, if I can use a calculation here again, after 19 years they would have put in $395,000. That contribution alone would entitle them to $1.5 million in total of annuity payments taken out over 30 years.

Let us say for the sake of round figure that people paid $400,000 in and got $1.5 million out. Then they would get $1.1 million that they did not put in. Where did it come from? It came from the accumulated interest. In a sense, the difference is what the contributor has lent to the federal government, not unlike buying a Canada savings bond or a government T-bill.

There is a loan to the government. It has the use of that money over that time. Some of it is simply interest taxpayers would have paid to the holder of a bond if it had not been that the government had that money available from the contributor to the pension plan. That is true for every public servant. That is true for everyone who is a member of parliament or a senator.

I would simply say to the taxpayers association that it has a case, but its case is not as strong as what it has been saying because of the lack of taking into account the proper, legitimate interest portion of the growth as opposed to being totally subsidized by the taxpayer. In fact the money does all come from the taxpayer, but like I said it was also partially interest on the loan that the taxpayer got by the contributions the particular member has contributed.

It is most unfortunate that I am being signalled since I could speak some more about this subject. I would like to simply say in conclusion and in summary that I intend to vote against the bill because of the coercive force of it and because it is still outside the parameters available to ordinary Canadians.

At the same time I would say that as a person who has always been the sole provider in our family I do have to look very carefully at what the options are, because I believe I have an obligation to my family. I will have to look at it very carefully. It has been a dilemma for me and continues to be. I want to say that I have, above all, a deep desire to serve not only the taxpayers of Elk Island but also the taxpayers of Canada with honour and with respect.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Relevance.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Where the Leader of the Official Opposition lays his head at night is irrelevant to Bill C-24. I call for relevance in this debate.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

That is the truth.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

From the member who just spoke. It was 20 minutes of lies. That is where it came from.