Pat Martin

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, June 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the figure is 64% of Canadians made no contributions to RRSPs. They do not have the money. They cannot afford it. This is another instrument that would encourage them to save more. It is like pushing the onus on individuals. I do not mind individuals standing up for themselves in their own best interests, but if they do not have the money to save currently, where will they find the money to contribute to this new savings scheme?

There is nothing that adds to the retirement security of ordinary Canadians in this bill. It is an illusion. As I say, it is not sorcery. It is bad magic. The government is trying to snow Canadians by putting the words “pension plan” in the title of a bill. It has nothing to do with a pension plan. It is a phony piece of work. Canadians should not fall for it. They deserve better.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, June 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud of the years that I have spent negotiating on behalf of ordinary working people as a trade unionist. We believe that fair wages and benefits benefit the whole community.

I was in the United States recently and saw a bumper sticker that read, “At the least the war on the middle class is going well”. That is about the size of it. There is a war on the middle-class. For some reason, the government is trying to lower our expectations so we will accept globalization unquestioningly, that we have to expect less and that there is no way we can afford a living wage, fair wages or to live as well as our parents did.

On this side of the House, we have dedicated our lives to elevating the standard of wages and working conditions for working people. That side of the House seems determined to undermine and diminish the wages and standard of living of Canadians. Why would anyone elect a government that would cut his or her wages? We had this debate yesterday on the Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act. It seems it is one thing after another. It is this war on labour on the left.

In whose interest is it to undermine the retirement and social security of Canadians by pieces of paper like this that are not worthy of the consideration of the chamber? Legacy costs are not the answer.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, June 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it should come as no surprise that I disagree profoundly with my colleague from Brandon—Souris, as I disagree with his party on the policy direction they are taking. I even disagree with just about everything the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance said. I think those guys are going down the wrong road and are doing the dirty work for corporate Canada once again.

Here are the origins of the bill. Thomas d'Aquino, when he was the head of the Business Council on National Issues, and then John Manley, when he became the president of the chief executive officers, or whatever they call themselves—the Grand High Poobahs of, really, the unelected Prime Minister of Canada, which is essentially what he is--declared that what was really holding back Canadian productivity was “legacy costs”. That is a nice way of saying those dirty pensions that our predecessors got into in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. That was back when we used to negotiate fair wages for working people, back when working people and their employers would sit down and put together a sensible benefit package with a real benefit plan for their retirement years. All of a sudden, the corporate world has declared that unaffordable and it does not like having the burden of legacy costs.

We can even look at what happened in 2008 with the economic downturn. As soon as the auto industry got into trouble, what did the executives of the auto industry say? It had nothing to do with the cars they were producing or their management skills or the way that they had dropped the ball and made products that nobody wanted to buy anymore. Right away they said that the reason they were not productive was because of the legacy costs. They said that it was the pension plans that were dragging them down. They said that something needed to be done about the pension plans so they trooped down here to their friends, the guys who they bought and paid for and put into power, and complained to them that they had to do something about these pensions.

Mr. Speaker, I forgot to say that I will be splitting my time with the member for Châteauguay—Saint-Constant.

The Conservatives put it in fine print so the world can see. They put in place this disingenuous bill with a title that actually uses the words “registered pension plan” in the title. This is another example of the creative writing class that takes place somewhere down in the bowels of the Conservative Party's black operations department. They develop these names that have nothing to do with the bill. In fact, they are 180 degrees opposite to the true intent.

There is nothing about this that is a pension plan. It does not bear any resemblance to a pension plan. It is a savings scheme that, frankly, is no different from what ordinary workers could do today if they were lucky enough to make enough to set money aside in an RRSP. They could put a little more money aside in an RRSP and have the same net effect as this, except that they would be gouged even further by the financial sector that also stands in the wings waiting to benefit from this huge shift of money that should normally be going into a pension vehicle such as a proper registered retirement pension plan or, the best retirement vehicle that we have, the Canada pension plan.

And you wonder, Mr. Speaker, why I have strongly held views on this issue?

I represent the riding of Winnipeg Centre and that, frankly, has been the home of two of the greatest champions of social justice that our country has ever known. In 1919, the Government of Canada wanted to send J.S. Woodsworth to prison for his role as a leader of the 1919 general strike. The good people of Winnipeg Centre sent him to Parliament instead where he became the founder and first leader of the CCF. He served there until 1942 when he died. Then the good people of Winnipeg Centre elected the person who came to be known as the father of the Canada pension plan, Stanley Knowles.

J.S. Woodsworth, while he was here, managed to wrestle old age security out of the Liberal government of the day. William Lyon Mackenzie King had a minority government. J.S. Woodsworth had two members, A.A. Heaps and J.S. Woodsworth were called the Ginger group. They were the Independent Labour Party, predating the CCF. They went to Mackenzie King and told him that they would support his government and prop it up if he would introduce old age security.

We have a letter on file at the NDP headquarters today that is signed by William Lyon Mackenzie King agreeing to that. It took him seven years to do it. It was 1926 by the time he actually fulfilled that promise. However, William Lyon Mackenzie King yielded to the pressure of the ginger group. The member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre managed to negotiate some semblance of pension.

When Stanley Knowles was elected, he not only brought in the Canada pension plan, the second initiative was the indexing of the Canada pension plan. Now, at a 1% operating cost, the Canada pension plan with a small amount of contribution yields a guaranteed benefit to Canadians in the neighbourhood of $900 or $1,000 a month. That is a good return. That is in the best interests of Canadians.

I am worried that as the government puts in phony bills like this and phony diversions like this, it will siphon off attention to, contributions in and participation in vehicles that work, like the Canada pension plan. It is as if it is throttling down the emphasis on the Canada pension plan.

We, when we form government in 2015, intend to undertake a comprehensive overhaul of the Canada pension plan, which will be meaningful support in old age security for Canadians. It has been charted out and it is part of our platform. It will be the most effective investment vehicle ever. Even if the Canadian pension plan as we know it were doubled, as being proposed by the NDP, the total old age security coming from that would still be less than social security in the United States. Social security in the United States has a maximum benefit of about $30,000 a year. If we take the CPP as it is today, even adding on the old age security of under $7,000 a year, that still only comes up to about $19,000 a year. We are well behind other countries, even the United States, in our social security benefits for seniors.

It frustrates me how disingenuous the Conservatives are when they introduce a bill that purports to be a pension plan for ordinary Canadians. I just heard the member for Don Valley West saying that his employees could never have a pension plan if it were not for this. He said that he had worked for years and all his employees never had any benefits. Maybe if he had given them a raise in pay they would have been able to buy some old age security. Why did the member not put a pension plan in his company? That is what we used to do in the old days, we had corporate social responsibility. We had capitalists with a social conscience. That seems to be gone.

Capital has no conscience. If it were not for the NDP here to impose some conscience into that party, it would just be following loyally and faithfully behind the Business Council on National Issues, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and all the other dummy outfits that undermine the basic needs of Canadians for their own selfish self-interest.

We can look at the handout this is to the financial sector. We can look at the dough they will make by managing all this dough again. It is appalling, frankly, how they gouge, and the percentages they take for moving money around. The best bargain is the Canada pension plan with an operating cost of less than 1%.

This bill diminishes and undermines the systems that work and would put in place a system that will not be effective and will be no better than issuing a piggy bank. The Conservatives might as well give every Canadian a piggy bank and say, “I know you have not had a raise for seven or eight years but here is a piggy bank. Put more money into it and you will have more money to spend when you retire.”

That is not creative. There are no financial geniuses over there. That is like pulling a sedated rabbit out of a tattered old top hat and trying to convince people it is magic. It is not magic.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, there is something Orwellian about my colleague's question. He is trying to imply that it is the NDP that is holding up a piece of legislation. That is the government. It has moved closure on every piece of legislation that it has put before the House of Commons since it has been government. It has moved closure and time allocation like it was giving it away with gas purchases, for heaven's sake.

It is not the NDP holding up the bill. If the government were serious about the bill, the House leader would put it on the legislative agenda for debate. I think the government is afraid to have a legitimate debate on the future of the Senate because it knows public opinion has shifted. It is worth too much to the Conservatives as a fundraiser. Now that they have lost the gun registry, they have nothing to go to their donor base with anymore except dangling this tantalizing illusion, this promise that they have no intention of fulfilling, of actually introducing Senate reform.

The Conservatives love the Senate the way it is because it is their safeguard. It is their stop-gap measure. If something should actually get through the House of Commons they can always kill it in the Senate. Their hacks, flaks and bagmen are standing by on guard and on duty.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, polls indicate that Canadians are not only ready and willing to reopen the Constitution, but have a desire and an appetite to see the Constitution reopened to solve a number of intergovernmental issues that do require amendment.

Perhaps the best comment we could close this debate with is from the current Prime Minister of Canada himself. On September 11, 2006, which was shortly after the Conservatives were elected, he said that the Senate should vanish if it is not reformed. He has had six years. He went on to say:

The mandate to govern when it is given directly by the people is a great honour and a great responsibility. It's the very essence of responsible government and it is the minimum condition of 21st-century democracy

He said this in a speech to the Australian senate:

The prime minister noted that Canadian senators are appointed and can "warm their seats" for as long as 45 years.

He suggested that if the Senate were not reformed, it should be abolished. He said that Canadians understand that our Senate as it stands today must either change or, like the old upper houses of our provinces, vanish. That is what a newly elected Prime Minister said, and now, after six years of failure, we agree with him. It cannot be fixed. It is too damaged. It is irreparably broken and it should be abolished and thrown on the trash heap of history.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, my Liberal colleague, who may be guided by the fact that he sits in caucus with 35 other senators, should at least recognize that this is the one time per year, during the process of main estimates, that we get the issue of the Senate before the House of Commons where we can legitimately raise the issue of the legitimacy and efficacy of the Senate and the desirability of maintaining it. He should also know that what we are voting on tonight is $57 million out of the $90 million budget of the Senate. This deals with salaries, et cetera. I have a number of emails from Canadians who suggest that if we reduced the salaries for senators down to about minimum wage, we would probably solve the problem of who is in it as a legitimate public service and who is in it to enjoy the great largesse that chamber seems to offer its denizens.

My Liberal colleague raises a legitimate point. We are bound in a system that is bicameral. Some of us believe it should be unicameral. We know that the process is onerous to achieve true constitutional reform to deal with the Senate structure. It has been done in other places. The Conservatives are not trying hard enough to reform the Senate in any legitimate way that would earn our support. In fact, they are abusing the advantage that they had to date by killing legislation that was legitimately introduced, debated and passed by the elected chamber of the House. It is the unelected dictating over the elected and, as Andrew Coyne says, that should offend the sensibilities of anyone who considers himself or herself a democrat.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I was hoping the parliamentary secretary would begin his remarks with a formal apology for accusing the NDP of raising this issue as some kind of a political stunt. Duly elected members of Parliament, availing themselves of the rules as they stand in the House of Commons, be it Marleau and Montpetit or O'Brien or Bosc, and exercising their democratic right as parliamentarians, should never be described as performing a political stunt. If I were able and wanted to filibuster on this issue, that would not be a political stunt. That would be exercising my democratic right as a member of Parliament. The member has missed one opportunity to apologize. Perhaps he will take time in the questions and comments period to rise on his feet again and give it another go.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, all of the provinces used to have senates, but they got rid of their second chambers. A lot of other Commonwealth countries either got rid of their second chambers or successfully reformed them. That is where I really question the sincerity of the current Conservative government about whether it actually intends to reform.

I went with the Prime Minister when he first announced his first Senate reform bill. I wandered down there. We were in the middle of the Federal Accountability Act, and I used to believe that the Conservatives were sincere about transparency and accountability. I do not believe that any more. I went with them when they announced to the Senate that they were going to change things, that today they were introducing a bill that was going to rock their world. A lot of senators were peeved, too; it was a very frosty reception, even from the Prime Minister's own Conservative senators.

Other similar Commonwealth democracies have done it. Australia set out about doing it, and did it. It fixed it. It is not an insurmountable problem. There is a lack of political will or finesse or ability, I suppose, building into it as well. However, no one call tell me that it is too hard to do, because I know it can be done and it certainly has been done. We should never question the resolve of the NDP to fix this ridiculous situation.

I realize I am from the west, so we are particularly aggrieved, I suppose. The province of British Columbia is one of the most under-represented, if there was a representative Senate. British Columbians probably have more right to complain than most: they have six senators and, I believe, four million people. There is about one senator for every 650,000 people.

This is how goofy it is and how desperately we need Senate reform: the province of New Brunswick, I believe, has 10 senators and less than a million people. Obviously there is even a greater imbalance when we look at the territories, but no one blames them. They are under-populated. They have one senator each. The province of Manitoba has six senators for only one million people, and Prince Edward Island, where Senator Duffy hails from, has in fact four senators and 135,000 people.

There are 100 good reasons to do away with the existing Senate. I obviously do not have time to go through them all, but let me say that I speak for many Canadians and even most recent opinion polls.

Two-thirds or more want serious Senate reform. As many as 61% say that they would like to open the Constitution to abolish the Senate. Two-thirds say they would like to open the Constitution to reform the Senate, and 61% say they would like to abolish the Senate. We are on the side of the angels in this one unless our intent is to abuse the right and misuse the powers of the Senate, as the government is doing; then, frankly, the only avenue of recourse we have, if we have any integrity, is to abolish the Senate.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Larry Smith—I am not even familiar with Larry Smith. What does Larry Smith do? It will come to me.

[Main Estimates 2012-13, June 6th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, let me preface my remarks by saying that no legitimate procedure in the House of Commons and the Parliament of Canada is a stunt. I resent the implication that anything that happens in this place that is properly within the rules and constitutional bylaws of this place is a stunt. There is nothing stuntish about bringing up a legitimate debate on a legitimate expenditure within the main estimates of the Parliament of Canada. I do not know where the parliamentary secretary gets off, but he should apologize for that remark at his first opportunity.

I moved a perfectly legitimate opposition motion to a spending item. As the chair of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, I have some knowledge of the main estimates in the Parliament of Canada and the government's obligation to come before the people to ask permission for spending.

Let us put this into perspective and into context. Perhaps the most sacred, so to speak, aspect of our parliamentary democracy is that the government is not allowed to spend money without going to Parliament to ask permission, to ask the representatives of the people for their permission, and those representatives of the people are entitled to have an opinion on how that money is spent. If I want to oppose one budget line of the main estimates, I will, and it is not a political stunt. It is perfectly legitimate and it is my right, my duty and my obligation as a member of Parliament and a representative of the people.

I put forward an opposed vote. I put forward a motion to oppose the vote that would give the budget to the Senate of Canada and I did it for specific reasons, many of which seem to have been either glossed over or missed altogether by the person whose duty and obligation it is to handle that file.

The government has asked that the Parliament of Canada approve, the House of Commons approve, $57,933,343 to fund the activities of the Senate. I oppose that spending and I oppose it for perfectly legitimate reasons. I can assure members that I am not alone in that opposition. In fact, if we polled the people of Canada, increasing numbers are calling in to question the need, the efficacy and even the desirability of having the Senate at all.

I would like to begin my remarks by quoting journalist Andrew Coyne, for whom I have a great deal of respect on some issues and I certainly admire his mastery of the English language. He says:

The Senate is Confederation’s original sin, the great stain on the [founding] fathers' handiwork, from which much greater evils have flowed. Structurally, it has contributed to the divisions and weaknesses that have bedevilled the federation. Without some constitutionally appropriate vehicle for expressing the concerns of the regions in federal politics, it has been left to the premiers, inappropriately, to do the job.

Worse, however, has been [the Senate's] corrosive effects, compounded over time, on our political ethics. It is of course intolerable that a free people should be governed, even in part, by those to whom they did not expressly grant such power. That would be true even if the Senate were filled with Solomons, and not the bizarre cargo of bagmen, strategists, failed candidates, criminals, cranks and other political problems that prime ministers have traditionally solved by the expedient of the Other Place.

Yes, some senators do good work. Committees of the Senate often produce thoughtful reports. But they have no more democratic right to translate their views into law, to move, amend, pass or reject bills and otherwise exercise the powers of legislators than I do. Though by convention the Senate’s powers are less than they appear on paper, they are still more than any patronage house should rightfully have, and have been exceeded on more than one occasion.

I enter those words into the record because I do not think I could put it better.

However, let me share some of the frustration expressed by Mr. Coyne, especially on his final point, that they “have been exceeded on more than one occasion”.

I am not going to restate some of the well-known objections that the NDP had historically to the Senate. What really put me over the top was when the Prime Minister exploited the opportunity and stacked the Senate with not only the campaign manager of the Conservative Party but the president of the Conservative Party, the chief fundraiser of the Conservative Party and his own communications director of the Conservative Party. The entire war room of the Conservative Party is now on the public purse. Not only do they have a full salary and travelling privileges and four staff people, but they are also doing partisan work on the taxpayers' dime. It is offensive to the sensibilities of anybody who would call themselves a democrat.

Not only that, more and more frequently we are finding bills being introduced into the House of Commons beginning with the letter “S”, not the letter “C”. The people in the other place have no right to introduce legislation. Nobody elected them to be legislators. They were appointed because they were party faithful, because they had a Conservative Party membership card in their back pocket, because they performed some duty for the party that has nothing to do with having the right. Mr. Coyne put it very appropriately.

What really pushed me over the top, what changed me from a person who believed that the Senate could be reformed, what really made me give up—just like Premier McGuinty, just like Premier Wall, just like Premier Selinger, just Premier Dexter, just like Roger Gibbins from the Canada West Foundation—was when the Conservatives abused a right that I do not believe they have: to kill legislation that had been introduced and properly debated and approved in the House of Commons, had gone through first reading, second reading, committee stage, report stage, third reading, and wound up in the Senate, where it was killed without a single witness being called, without a single hour of debate. It was summarily executed.

That bill was of great significance to me and to my party. It was the bill in the name of Jack Layton, the climate change bill. It would have been the only piece of environmental legislation passed by the House of Commons in a decade. It was three years in the making and it was carefully crafted. After garnering the support of the Liberal Party, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, and after it had passed through all stages in the House, it was killed in the Senate without a single hour of debate. That was the final straw for a lot of Canadians.

The other bill that the Conservative summarily executed without any trial or any meaningful debate was the drugs for Africa bill. For God's sake, it was Stephen Lewis's initiative to provide generic AIDS and malaria drugs to Africa at a reduced cost so that we could challenge the global pandemic with the wealth and the opportunity of the west going to developing nations. That bill was five years in the making. That was agonizing, because we had to get it past big pharma. We had to get it through all the obstacles. It was an almost impossible task. It finally went through the House of Commons, but the Senate killed it.

These two noble, worthy initiatives—developed, introduced, debated and passed by the democratically elected representatives of the people—were summarily smashed by a bunch of hacks and flacks and bagmen taking partisan orders from the PMO instead of being any kind of objective chamber of sober second thought. The triple-E Senate is probably the latest in a string of Conservative principles that were jettisoned in the interests of political expediency. There have been many others.

With all due respect, I do not believe the parliamentary secretary. I am not calling him a liar. I just do not want anybody to think I believe him, because I do not. I do not believe the Conservatives are sincere about Senate reform. Now that they control the Senate, they like the Senate. It is 59 members to 35 members. They have a solid majority of senators in that chamber, and they are an extension of the Conservative caucus, as they are with Liberal senators as well.

It used to be quality people doing important work, almost in a public service way. I am thinking of Senator Yves Morin, a wonderful man, a gifted cardiologist from the University of McGill, who did not need to be a senator at the end of his career, but he did.

Those were good people. There was Senator Wilbert Keon, the head of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Ottawa. These are fine people. Even people like Lowell Murray and Hugh Segal, the old-timers, at least had some memory of what the Senate was supposed to do and supposed to be like. This new bunch is not like that. The 20 or 30 that the Prime Minister has stacked the Senate with recently are just a bunch of partisan pawns. They take their direction from the cabinet and the PMO. They are not giving intelligent second thought to legislation, they are killing it out of hand at the direction and control of the Prime Minister. They are an extension of the Conservative Party. They are not doing any material good. They are not enhancing democracy. In fact, they are sabotaging democracy.

Why would we spend $57 million to undermine the integrity of our democratic institutions? I can think of a lot better places to spend that money, and that is why I introduced this opposition motion today. If the parliamentary secretary thinks it is mischief or a political stunt, it is anything but. I believe to the core of my being that the Senate is a barrier to the democratic process. It has ceased to serve any valuable function whatsoever. It is a hangover.

He says that there is no appetite for constitutional reform. I took part in the 1992 Charlottetown Accord hearings that criss-crossed the country. I was an ordinary Canadian, a journeyman carpenter at the time. Joe Clark was the minister responsible.

There were five huge conferences across the country, fully supported by educators, academics and parliamentary staff. It got hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Canadians together to rethink the Constitution, to give it some serious thought, and the Senate was on the table as a topic. We underestimate Canadians if we think there is no appetite. It is only people who have a vested interest in keeping this decision-making away from the Canadian people who maintain that the Canadian people do not want it. I argue that there is a great deal of interest and a great appetite now, just as there was in 1992.

It has been 20 years since any government has had the temerity to open up the Constitution to try to fix some of the intergovernmental affairs that need addressing, to revisit whether we still want the monarchy to be our head of state, to revisit whether we really want a Senate, to modernize Canada and keep up with the times. Instead of being dragged backward, we could be moving forward with a plan of what we want Canada to look like. Those are reasons that the Constitution is a living, breathing entity, not something that has been carved into a marble template like Moses and the Ten Commandments. That is not what a constitution is.

We cannot be afraid to open the Constitution because it is difficult. If these guys think we cannot look at the future of the Senate because it is too hard to do, then they are not worthy of being the government of the day. That is not leadership. That is the polar opposite of leadership.

I feel strongly about this issue. This is not the first time that I have tried to cut off the blood supply to the Senate. I am the first to admit that it is a long-drawn-out process if we are to look at meaningful Senate reform. I do not think the Conservatives are trying hard enough. I think they like abusing the power that they have gained now that they have stacked the Senate and used it as a paid job for their fundraisers.

I have to point out a couple of really atrocious things. It offends me to no end when I see senators managing political campaigns on a senator's salary. They are not even elected representatives. They are supposed to be out of the elected world, but yet, sure enough, the former party president, Senator Plett, is the campaign manager in the federal election for the province of Manitoba, full time, flat out, on salary, using those travel privileges, using all the resources he has at his disposal. That, to me, is absolutely offensive.

As well, it offends me when I see Senator Mike Duffy flying around like a stand-up comic, entertaining at Conservative Party fundraisers. It seems to be his full-time job. The rest of the time they seem to be like the Harlem Globetrotters, only these are like the globe-trotting hog-troughers. They take every parliamentary junket possible. They never, ever miss an opportunity to fly around the world.

Do we really need to be spending $57 million on that?

To put it in perspective, yesterday I held a press conference complaining about the cutback of $2 million a year to the Experimental Lakes Area, which is a scientific research project in northwestern Ontario that brings us great credibility in the future of both freshwater fisheries and freshwater lakes. That is $2 million a year and 17 scientists gaining us enormous international credibility, and in fact it has paid for itself time and time again, saving us a fortune in mistakes. That is gone, yet we unquestioningly approve $57 million for something hardly anybody wants and nobody needs, something that gets abused all the time and in fact undermines the integrity of our democratic system.

We really have to wonder what we could do with $57 million if we did not have to fund a bunch of washed-up former candidates.