Mr. Speaker, it is certainly an honour for me to be here today to speak to the bill and to the amendments that have been put forward.
First, as many people have done, I would like to honour our veterans. I will be in Red Deer for the ceremony, and then I will be dropping in to all the Legions in the riding. I would also like to thank all those people who will be participating in wreath-laying on behalf of the federal government. A great friend of mine, a veteran from the Korean War, Smiley Douglas, has done this for me for many years. I certainly appreciate their great effort and commitment in presenting wreaths on behalf of Canada.
One of the other points that came up was this quote, which has been presented two or three different times. It says:
It (the CPP) is not intended to provide all the retirement income which many Canadians wish to have. This is a matter of individual choice and, in the Government's view, should properly be left to personal savings and private pension plans.
That was from the Hon. Judy LaMarsh, the Liberal minister responsible for establishing the CPP in 1964.
Many people ask me how I got my start in politics. I talk about the political side and choosing a political party. The reality is that I got my start by trying to understand the things that were happening in this country when the Canada pension plan was being discussed back in the sixties.
I remember going with my father to meetings in town halls or in basements and the discussion that was taking place. My father was in his mid-forties at the time. He said that the pension plan was going to be great for him, but it was going to be awful for me, because I would end up having to pay this for the rest of my life and if I were a self-employed person, this would be the key approach. It turned out that I have not been a self-employed person, but a self-employed person pays twice as much. They pay both sides.
These are the kinds of things I learned. I recognize the importance of what will take place. That is something I certainly remember. My father passed away six weeks after I was elected in 2008. I think of him every time I walk into this chamber, but I also think of the lessons learned. Certainly the lesson on the Canada pension plan was ingrained in me.
We should really talk about what the government is looking for and what this omnibus legislation would do. It says that over the next 40 years, CPP retirement benefits will rise from an income replacement rate of 25% to 33% of employment earnings, and to finance these benefits, the government will hike the CPP premium rate from 9.9% to 11.9%, starting in 2019, which we might notice is not until after the next election.
The other thing to keep in mind as we continue to hear from the other political parties is that we have to help seniors. This will not be helping the present-day seniors. This will not be helping the majority of the people who are in this chamber because of the timing.
There are some things we can do to help seniors, and there are some things we can do to help people who are working so that when they are in their senior years, they have something to fall back on.
Something that was mentioned earlier by one of our colleagues was to teach some financial literacy to people so they understand. There must have been some financial literacy taught, as we have reduced the poverty rate for seniors from the 29% it was back in the 1970s to less than 4% now. People are looking at what they are doing, and they are recognizing the importance of dealing with issues themselves.
As far as financial literacy is concerned, I spent a career teaching mathematics. I always wanted to make sure that people understood how they could look after their money so they could deal with things themselves. It was understanding annuities, looking at the different tax credits so they could do their tax forms and probably help their parents finish these things off, and understanding the different investment instruments, how this would work, and what they could do for themselves.
I always use the concept that, if people didn't smoke and took that much every day and invested it, just think how much money people would have at the end of the day. Then, of course, we would be investing it back into the government. We would be paying our taxes and everything else that was associated with that. However, when they start realizing that would have been a way to maybe come up with $1 million for themselves, these are the sorts of things that I think are important. They are the sorts of things that people should recognize.
When we talk about this and when we take a look at what it is going to do, for those that would be at the maximum when this comes into force, it would be $2,200, $1,100 for the individual and $1,100 for the company. If a person happens to be the company, that is $2,200 that is going to come out of what they could have reinvested to help themselves. These are critical components that we have to recognize.
I have yet to hear anyone really talk about the self-employed and the plight they are in, especially when we look at what is happening in Alberta right now. Look at the situation we heard about earlier. Calgary has hit the 10.2% unemployment rate. Red Deer has been into the double digits for a number of months. Right now, when we start to talk about where we are going to go in the future, this is where the difficulty lies. The difficulty lies in the fact that people have no confidence. We do not know whether or not we are ever going to be able to move our natural resources to tidewater. We look at people who are throwing sand in the gears and it seems as though they are the only ones who are being heard.
The second aspect that we have to recognize here is the tax burden. We look at carbon taxes and we look at the different types of things. In Alberta, there was a price on carbon, and the way in which it was set was so that it was going to be put in to help businesses so that they could do their own reduction. If we make a general carbon tax for anyone, it is easy. Let the government deal with that. We do not have to worry about it. These are the kinds of things that could be done.
When we also consider the payroll tax and the costs that are going to be tied into that right now, where then is the confidence? The confidence is going to other countries. It is not like in 2008 and 2009 when even banks would not lend to each other. The situation now is that there is money and there are dollars available, trillions of dollars just with our seniors and our investors here in Canada alone, but we have to be careful. We have to recognize that if we continue to look at ways of discouraging entrepreneurs from doing the things that are necessary, we are certainly going to be in a terrible situation.
In closing, I would like to point out some of the concerns that people have. I could perhaps have gone through even a few more of the quotes that we have, but I will just close with this particular quote. It says:
Whatever the reason might be to expand the CPP, it is not to eliminate poverty. The poverty rate among seniors is now as close to zero as we can get. ...a little over five per cent of seniors today still have income below the poverty line
This is a quote from Morneau Shepell, by the co-author with our Minister of Finance of The Real Retirement, in the Financial Post on June 5, 2016.
I had known it to be 3.7%. I do not know whether it already bumped up to 5% by the time they looked at it, but I know that we have done an amazing job and that we have all of the tools there for our seniors.
