Mr. Speaker, I am happy to stand to talk about the pooled registered pension plan bill that is here before us.
I am going to talk a bit about some of my experiences as a small-business person and how this would help the employers, the employees and the entrepreneurial sector of our economy. The small businesses, as was said earlier, are the driving forces in our economy. We sometimes forget how important that sector is and how hard it is for them to save for retirement.
I am also going to talk a bit about what a pooled registered pension plan is, so that we can better understand what it is, how it works and what it would do.
If I have time, I am going to talk about the organizations and people out there who have talked positively about pooled registered pension plans, and I will try to convince some of my colleagues on the other side that this would be a great tool to put in the toolbox of pension saving.
First, let me talk about small businesses. Let me talk about small-business owners. In my past, I have certainly been a small businessman. I have been a mentor to other small-business people. Far too often the entrepreneurs in this country worry a lot about one thing in their business. That is the customer, the person who they are selling their product or their service to; that is their whole outreach. Small-business people and entrepreneurs are singularly focused to do what they do and do it right.
It is not that they, in any way, dislike their employees or do not want to do best by them, but something like putting together a pension plan for the employees would come under some of the other things that small business owners and entrepreneurs have to do. It is about their economy. It is about growing their business and serving their customers right.
Entrepreneurs, by their true nature, are usually very good at one thing, whatever it is. I rather like the food business and the customer service side of the food business. I was very focused and I knew I was very good at that. Others may be very good as insurance brokers, as mentioned earlier, as dentists or whatever. Whatever small-business owners are engaged in, they are usually absolute experts at the one thing they do.
But guess what? Small-business owners are the only people who get to make the decisions. They get to be the purchasing director, the person who ensures all the supplies show up and at the right price. They are also in charge of marketing, even though their business may not be about marketing. They are in charge of making sure customers come and are happy.
Most of the day, they spend their time being a coach, a trainer, helping their employees do the job right to serve their people properly. They are also financial planners because their bank will want to know what it is they are looking for. Sometimes they are nothing more than cleaners. If there is a spill, as owners, they are the ones who clean it up. That is what small-business people do: customer service, customer complaints. They are in charge of productivity. In a big business, there may be a whole department, but here in small-business and entrepreneurism, it is the owners. The owners of a small business are responsible for ensuring that happens. They are the accounts payable manager. They are the accounts receivable manager. They are all these things. As small-business people, they may be expert at one thing, but they are responsible for being good at all those things.
Let us add to it, then, pension planning. It just is not in their portfolio, in most cases.The pooled registered pension plan would give them the ability to allow that to go somewhere else. It would be administered by pooling together a business' employees with other businesses' employees, those of other small-business people and other entrepreneurs who might otherwise never plan a pension plan. The money would go into a great big pool and would be administered by someone else. A small-business owner would think, “Is that ever good. Somebody is going to do part of my list. I'm going to be able to hand this off to someone else”.
Let us talk a bit about what the pooled registered pension plan would do. It would do exactly what it says. It would allow businesses, certainly small businesses, entrepreneurs, single-owner businesses and single-operated businesses, to pool together.
I cannot tell members how many times during RRSP season I drive by a bank with a sign that says to buy RRSPs by such and such a date. As a small-business owner I may have even been on my way to that bank to make a deposit. However, I would get to that the next day. Procrastination on the areas where we are not really experts, as entrepreneurs, get left until the next day.
One of the previous speakers asked, if this is so great, why is there not more uptake on RRSPs and why is there not more uptake on TFSAs, the tax-free savings accounts. The reason is that they both require a small-business owner to go someplace and do something. This requires employees to automatically become registered as part of a pooled pension, and it works. It will automatically happen.
As a small-business owner, I always thought my small business was my retirement. That was part of the financial planning. At the end of the day, I hoped it was worth enough and I could sell it, and that was how I would retire. I think most entrepreneurs out there with a small number of employees, or no employees at all, think that is what their retirement is. Their saving for retirement is working hard every day, hoping their business is successful.
What the pooled registered pension plan does is make it also available for them to pool together with other small businesses and save for their retirement in a different way besides simply being the cleaner, the dentist, the hairdresser or whatever the business is. It just is out there. It is a tool in their toolbox. It makes it easy. If we can make it easy, people will do it. It makes it easy for them to pool together to get their employees to automatically register, and then there are pensions out there.
I heard one of the previous speakers talk about some 60% of people in Canada not having a pension plan. That is absolutely right. It is terrible. Here is a chance for more people, whatever their rate of pay, to pool together their assets in those pooled pension plans and allow that to pay for itself and provide a pension plan for them.
In order to increase or do anything with the Canada pension plan, it takes the provincial ministers of finance and the federal Minister of Finance to agree to do it. I am sorry, but we are not at that point. We have not yet been able to get the required number of provinces to do that. That is not on the table, but this is, and when it was launched it had unanimous consent of the ministers of finance in the provincial and federal governments to move forward to do this. It can be done.
Let me switch to some of the great comments that have been made about pooled registered pension plans on behalf of small business. I recognize that I am concentrating there because of being a former small-business owner. The new voluntary low-cost and administratively simple retirement savings mechanism would allow more employers and employees and those who are self-employed to participate in a pension plan. Who would not wish for that to happen?
Dan Kelly, from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business agrees and wants it to happen.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce stated that this legislation:
...introduced...has the potential to benefit the estimated 60 per cent of Canadians who have either no, or insufficient, retirement savings.
That is the group we are trying to address here, those who are not part of a large industry and have a pension plan to go with it. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce believes PRPPs, pooled registered pension plans, would give many businesses the flexibility and tools they need to help their employees save for retirement, who might otherwise not do it because they missed the great big reader board at the front of the bank saying that RRSP time was here and it was time to put some money in there.
Here is one of my favourites. Minister Duncan from Ontario said that the McGuinty government supports the federal Conservatives' PRPP proposal but believes it is only one tool in helping Canadians save more.
I agree. It is only one tool. We will still have the Canada pension plan, the OAS and the rest of the things, but there is just one that would have given me a chance to save for retirement as a small-business owner, a person who got up every morning and went and worked for myself most of my life.
This is important to us. Let us get this done.
