Mr. Speaker, I would like to really discuss the issues raised by Bill C-25. This bill should have been an opportunity to improve pension plans in Canada, something that would have made Canadians wealthier. Unfortunately, with this system, the only ones who will benefit will be the corporate welfare bums.
It is important to understand how this system is funded. Employees do not get to decide who administers their retirement savings; the employer decides. Employees are not the ones who decide the level of investment risk they will assume or where their money will go. Once again, it is the employer who decides.
Ironically, the employer that decides the level of risk and chooses the administrator is in a conflict of interest with regard to that administrator. What happens when the employer does business with the same financial institutions with which it negotiates its line of credit, its insurance and all the other financial products a business might need? It is a blatant conflict of interest.
On top of that, in this bill the government is saying that employers, the business owners, are not responsible for their actions under the law. If they choose the worst administrator or the highest level of risk, this legislation exonerates them. Legal exoneration is included in Bill C-25. This is unbelievable. People are either strongly for or strongly against these corporate welfare bums. The Conservatives strongly support them, and Bill C-25 is proof of that.
The government has decided that no matter what the returns on the investments—be they negative or positive—the financial institution will be the first to benefit. Imagine that. The institution will charge administrative fees regardless of the returns. Then it will collect its profit margin because it is a private company. Then, depending on the level of risk, it will collect bonuses. Inflation is also a factor. If the return is 3% and inflation is 2%, then the net return is 1%. Unfortunately, people will not even get that 1% because they are the very last in line after administrative fees, bonuses and rates of return. Basically, this means that no matter what the situation, the administrators will be the ones making money. Whether the market is up or down, they will make money.
Paradoxically, if the deductions are too high, the people investing in the pooled registered pension plans proposed in Bill C-25 will experience consistently negative returns. A person who invests $600 a year for 30 years can expect to withdraw at least $18,000, right? Not so. With this wonderful plan, he might have much less than that. He is not even guaranteed to get back the money he put in. This is not a pension plan or even a lottery. It is outright theft.
The Conservatives have decided to put the financial future of retirees in the hands of people whose primary interest is to earn the maximum amount of money, not to generate a return or guarantee a pension, but to earn money now, right away.
The icing on the cake is that the Conservatives say in the bill that administrators are prohibited from using gifts to encourage employers to allow them to manage the pension fund. However, this type of deal is allowed according to the regulations. Not only is there already a clear conflict of interest, but this also legalizes bribes. Unbelievable. Then they claim that it is for the good of the employees.
We have proposed that, at least, the right to charge administrative fees should be dependent on the return.
If pension funds are properly managed, the administrator has the right to charge a fee, but if it they are poorly managed, the administrator should not be paid. The administrators must take on part of the risk, which would motivate them a bit to always aim for big returns, but no, they do not take on any risk. The only risk is taken on by the employees, who do not even have the right to choose their administrator and level of risk. That is outright abuse. This is where Bill C-25 systematically goes after workers.
This is not a pension plan, but an extremely toxic financial product just like the junk bonds we saw in the 1970s and 1980s, and the commercial papers we saw in 2008. That is how toxic this is. People absolutely must not invest in this. I would like to take this opportunity to tell people that the last thing they should do is choose to participate in such a plan. They should buy a house. We hear a lot about pension plans, but at the same time, we have never seen such a high number of Canadians who own their homes.
Quite often, Canadians' main investment is their home, and that is smart. However, the Conservatives are not taking that into account. They are saying that 60% of people do not have a pension plan. That is not true. Canadians are investing in their pension by investing in their homes. A house is a capital asset that appreciates in value rather than depreciating like the plan the government is proposing.
What can we say about a regime, a political party, a government that systematically stands up for the rich? The government is ignoring the needs of all Canadians to help only 1% of the population, the wealthiest members of our society. Since the Conservatives have come to office, the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening. The poor have become poorer, as has a large part of Canada's middle class—in short, the vast majority of Canadians. Meanwhile, the Conservatives' friends, the corporate welfare bums, have grown even richer. And that does not bother the Conservatives at all. Clearly, they are even in favour of it.
This type of government regime, which robs the vast majority of people to favour its friends, is called a kleptocracy. That is exactly what we are dealing with here: people who work only for the wealthiest members of our society in the hopes that perhaps, one day, these extremely rich people will invest their wealth and use it to buy goods, which will drive the economy. However, what we have been seeing for the past 10 years is that these people are not investing in Canada. They are taking the money that they get in Canada and investing it abroad, in financial products and corporate acquisitions. That is not creating any jobs at all. It is even causing us to lose jobs.
The Conservatives could have taken action to prevent situations like the ones that occurred at Nortel and AbitibiBowater from happening again, but they did not. Their friends, the corporate welfare bums, did not want them to. They did not want regulations to be imposed, and regulations are still not present in Bill C-25. The Conservatives are not regulating this bill.
They say that the market will determine how to proceed, but right now, the market is not favourable to workers in this country. It only works for the people opposite in this kleptocracy, people who only work for the rich. They have once again decided to systematically favour the rich. This pooled registered pension plan is a highly toxic financial product. I urge all Canadians not to invest a single penny in it, because it is a guaranteed loss. The only people who are going to make money from those plans are the ones administering them.
