Bruce Hyer

[Canada-U.S. Relations, June 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, top Mounties have revealed that the government intends to allow U.S. law enforcement officers to operate on Canadian soil.

Is the minister actually planning to allow this as part of a Conservative security deal? Would it include the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. immigration?

Will the minister table any draft agreement in the House so that this deal gets the scrutiny it deserves?

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the many good points made by the member. Would she agree with me that this is an attack not just on workers, but it is an attack on small and large businesses across Canada that provide important minerals, wood, fish, agricultural products and that this will disempower rural Canada and increase the urbanization of Canada? It has broad implications beyond the individual but severe effects.

[Business of Supply, May 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Ottawa—Vanier has done a really good job of explaining why co-operatives are a good idea, why they have been good for Canada and Canadians and why we should foster and grow them. I also want to compliment the Liberals on putting forth this very important motion. I hope it will be voted for unanimously tonight. I know the member of the independent democrats will certainly vote for it.

The hon. member dealt with co-operatives in a very broad way. I am particularly interested in credit unions and caisses populaires. One out of three Canadians today uses them for transactions. They are cost effective, affordable and the members are the customers. There are lots of good reasons for it.

Does he have any ideas on how we can immediately focus on helping our banking institutions that belong to the people?

[Continuation and Resumption of Rail Service Operations Legislation, May 29th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, why is it that when required legislation is put forward, like Senate reform that was promised, it takes ages and ages and weeks and years but when something like the HST or this legislation needs to be debated, it can be rammed through in hours? There are a number of abuses to democracy that we are seeing in the House these days. It could take hours to list them all.

Why does the Conservative Party and the minister favour U.S.-controlled and owned large corporations over the rights of workers across Canada?

[The Environment, May 18th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, two years ago the Conservative member for Kenora crowed about the importance of new dollars for the Experimental Lakes Area. He said, “The Experimental Lakes Area is known worldwide as Canada’s most innovative freshwater research centre. ...we are investing in projects like this one--helping to establish Canada as a leader in knowledge creation...”.

Will the member for Kenora fight for the research centre that he bragged about recently or just allow his party to toss those investments and his credibility into the experimental lakes?

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, the hon. member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River introduced private member's legislation that was excellent and would put pension plans first ahead of other creditors. I hope he will reintroduce that legislation in this House and I hope all members of Parliament will support it. Just as paycheques should come before creditors, so should their pension plans, which are really paycheques held in arrears.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am not opposed to investments at all. Investments should be intelligent and voluntary. It is a form of gambling, let us face it, no matter how good a job we think we are doing. We need to average the risks. We need to average the costs. We need to have skilful people planning and making those investments, and we need to do it at that one-quarter of 1% affordable rate of investment and administrative costs compared to the expensive costs of having brokers do it.

In my province of Ontario, it has become very clear for many years that the security and exchange investment community is badly in need of regulation.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to the government's bill. It is what I call the proposed private, for profit, pooled pensions plan. That leaves me speechless.

More seriously, few things are more important to Canadians than their retirement security. For decades they work hard to build a good life for themselves and their families. Every paycheque deduction includes a little something tucked away in their pension plan.

When it comes time to retire, people rightfly expect to be able to live in dignity and with some financial security. However, as too many Canadians have found out in recent years, their retirement may not be as secure as they were led to believe and were hoping. RRSPs have taken a beating, and many of those who had been counting on a company pension plan have had a rude shock.

Many found out their plans were underfunded, or they lost everything when their company went bankrupt and took workers' pensions with them. This has been a particular problem in Thunder Bay—Superior North, where a host of creditors, often including the actual owners of the failed subsidiary company, have claims that take precedence over those of pensioners. In a modern industrialized democracy, that just should not be allowed to happen, and my friend representing Thunder Bay—Rainy River has tried to introduce a private member's bill to put pensioners first.

One thing that has been rock-steady throughout turbulent times is the Canada pension plan, to which 93% of Canadians subscribe. Companies come and go and iInvestment vehicles like income trusts may arise and then be snatched back the next year by fickle governments, but people can count on the CPP.

It is the most secure retirement vehicle we have. The CPP remains the single most effective solution to ensure retirement security. It is portable, it is sustainable, and it spreads the risk to minimize risk. It is publicly and cheaply administered at a fraction of the administrative costs of private plans. It is far more sustainable than private plans and it pays predictable benefits that do not fall if markets collapse.

The one drawback is that it is not high enough. The maximum benefit currently is only $986 a month, and the average is only $528 a month. That, as we know, is not adequate to live on.

People are expecting to make up the shortfall by investing in private investment vehicles such as the pooled pension plan the government is advancing, but private savings vehicles cost many times more than saving in public pension plans.

The administration cost of the CPP is about one-quarter of 1%, while the cost of RRSPs and mutual funds ranges from 2.5% to 4% or even more. Private plans are great for brokers and bankers in Bimmers, but not so great for real, sustainable growth in pensioners' hard-earned investments, and there is little indication of any cap on fees for those pooled plans.

That 2.5% to 4% or more every year eats away at people's retirement. It adds up. When it comes time to retire, Canadians will have many, many thousands less, so why not have it adding up and working for pensioners instead of for private investment companies? Allowing Canadians to opt for contributions up to an extra 2.5% to the CPP would double their benefits, and those are defined benefits, secure benefits. They are a retirement benefit that future seniors can actually count on.

The benefits of the CPP over private schemes do not stop there. Unlike public pensions, private savings are rarely indexed for inflation. That could mean a further lost savings of from 1% to 3% per year, a loss that alone cuts people's initial investment in half over a 30-year period.

As well, the CPP is highly portable for everyone throughout Canada. Pooled registered pension plans are much less so.

By far the biggest fault in this whole pooled pension plan scheme is that it fails to address the needs of Canadians who cannot afford to save for retirement. The vast majority of Canadians do not pay into plans like RRSPs because they simply cannot afford it. According to StatsCan, 60% of Canadians currently do not have any formal pension at all. There are already private retirement investments available out there; if Canadians could afford them, we would not have millions who do not have a pension.

Adding another voluntary and speculative investment plan they cannot afford will not significantly help the situation.

There is a lot we can do in this House to improve retirement security for Canadians. We should be seeking to insure Canadians' pensions, like we do their bank deposits. We should protect pensions when companies go bankrupt by putting pensioners first as creditors, ahead of banks, ahead of shell companies that skim the profits and dump the subsidiaries, as has happened in Thunder Bay—Superior North.

After all the ruined retirements these past few years due to corporate bankruptcies, including many in our forest sector in northwestern Ontario, it is absolutely incredible that the government has not taken action on that front. We should be taking action on all these fronts and allowing Canadians to choose to contribute more to the CPP as well.

There is no reason to continue preventing Canadians from saving more through the one vehicle open to all workers, including the self-employed, a vehicle that is low-cost, universal and portable. It is inflation and risk-proof, with defined benefits, guaranteed by the Government of Canada, that is not yet another private investment scheme that most Canadians will not invest in. That is the CPP.

Instead, all we have is a proposal from the Conservative government to help line the pockets of banks and investment companies some more. It may help some well-off Canadians who can already afford to contribute to private investment vehicles, that may be true, but it will not help the people who need it most, the majority of Canadians. Now we have the added insult and injury of Canadians having to wait from 65 until 67 years old for their old age supplements.

The Conservative government does a great job of looking out for the interests of big banks, big oil companies and other global multi-nationals with little commitment to any country or workers or their families. This past spring the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosted international pension expert, Keith Ambachtsheer, for our big thinking lecture here on Parliament Hill. For the MPs who got up that early to attend, this pension expert made it very clear that the administrative fees on private pension plans usually eat up any pension fund growth. He made it clear that the best pathway to any truly safe and sustainable pension plan for Canadian families was retaining and expanding CPP.

I realize that this is an ideologically driven party and government that rarely wants its beliefs to be confused by facts, research, statistics, senseless data or science but, hopefully, on this absolutely crucial question of pensions, it will, it should, listen to experts like Mr. Ambachtsheer. Hopefully it will follow his expert and sage advice and build upon the excellent and sustainable Canada pension plan, a safe, predictable, cost-effective and sustainable model admired worldwide. It just needs expanding to meet modern costs of living.

Canadians know and trust the CPP. They do not want to gamble their pensions, their lives and their retirement futures on a lottery run by expensive bankers and investment brokers.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, that was an impressive and thoughtful analysis. I learned a lot. It is quite clear that the hon. member does not really think much of Bill C-25. She thinks it is a poor substitute for enhancing our current CPP system.

Given the great job that my colleague has done in showing how the bill is not very good, I am wondering why the Liberals intend to vote for it at this time.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I am very disappointed to hear that the Liberals will support this very flawed notion of a pooled private system. I wonder if any of them, including that member, attended last spring when the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosted pension expert Keith Ambachtsheer for a big-thinking lecture series on the Hill. He is an internationally acknowledged expert on pensions. He made it very clear that we already had a superb system that operated at a tiny fraction of 1% in terms of administration fees, with guaranteed defined benefits at the end of the day, backed by government. He said it was a system that people could count on and that it was more effective and more efficient than a private system where the fees would be 2.5% to 4% or even more.

I ask the Liberals and that member to rethink this, go with the advice from the real experts in the field and not let any of our ideologies drive this. I ask them to look at the facts and the science behind it.