Scott Reid

[Question No. 67, February 3rd, 2003]

For the fiscal years 1993/94, 1994/95, 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 1999/2000 and 2000/2001, from all departments and agencies of the government, including crown corporations and quasi/non-governmental agencies funded by the government, and not including research and student-related grants and loans, what is the list of grants, loans, contributions and contracts awarded in the constituency of Ottawa South, including the name and address of the recipient, whether or not it was competitively awarded, the date, the amount and the type of funding, and if repayable, whether or not it has been repaid?

(Returns tabled)

[Question No. 57, January 27th, 2003]

As part of the Implementation plan for the Kyoto Protocol as called for in the motion adopted by the House on October 24, 2002, is the government guaranteeing infringing upon provincial jurisdiction in meeting Kyoto targets?

[Question No. 56, January 27th, 2003]

As part of the Implementation plan for the Kyoto Protocol as called for in the motion adopted by the House on October 24, 2002, is the government willing to move ahead with Kyoto ratification without the support of the provinces?

[Health, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the position of the Prime Minister over the past nine years has been to pay less and less into health care and demand 100% of control. At 14% of funding for health care in the country, the government wants to set all the rules.

That is the wrong approach. The Canadian Alliance believes that is the wrong approach. We propose that Ottawa work with the provinces to help them meet their individual health care needs.

Will the Prime Minister drop the federal government's one size fits all and do it or else approach and instruct the Minister of Health to work with the provinces to deal with their diverse health care needs?

[Health, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, from the moment this government came into office, cooperation with the provinces on health care reform went the way of federal contributions to health care, that is, it diminished.

The Kirby and Romanow reports were supposed to signal a new cooperative approach; instead, this government missed this opportunity and has since resumed its old political habits in matters of health.

Will the Prime Minister explain why he angered the provinces by giving them a federal unilateral ultimatum on the eve of the health ministers' meeting?

[Modernization of Parliament, December 13th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, this week Liberal members on the procedure and House affairs committee took a giant step backward when it came to democratizing Parliament.

The Liberals, in particular their wannabe prime minister, talk a fine line when it comes to focus tested phrases like democratic deficit, but when it comes to actual specific reforms that would democratize this place, in particular allowing for all private members' business to be votable, they cut the legs out from under it.

Why will the Liberals not keep a promise they made in all party consultations a year ago and allow for all private members' business to be votable?

[Canada Pension Plan, December 13th, 2002]

I can point out to the members who are making jokes that members of this House have a special pension plan that is set up to provide more generous benefits than those provided through the Canada pension plan. That of course is a consequence of the fact that we get to choose our own pension plan, whereas Canadians must live with whatever we give them. It seems to me that we ought to give them the best rate of return possible.

A woman who is aged 65 today and who has a 50% chance of living to be 90 will depend on the CPP to pay her benefits 25 years from now. If the pension plan is not secure and those rates are not guaranteed, she may very well find herself at 90 years old facing a cut in her pensions.

Could this happen? It already has happened. The former finance minister, the hon. member for LaSalle—Émard, actually did cut Canada pension plan benefits very slightly, but he did it nonetheless, when he was making his first run of changes to this plan several years ago.

There are a number of problems with the decision to put restrictions on foreign content for Canada pension plan investment moneys. One is, as I mentioned, a lower rate of return. A second one is a higher rate of risk. When we put all our eggs in one national basket we face currency risk. If the government continues to allow the value of the Canadian dollar to fall, and it seems to be a pattern that we have seen from the government, then we can expect to have the Canada pension plan pay substantially lesser returns than it would have. That is not calculated into the actuarial projections.

We can expect to see transaction costs. When we have a very large fund like this one working away in a single small market as a huge component of that market, it automatically bids up costs when it attempts to purchase into equities in that market. When it attempts to sell, it drives down the price. It automatically therefore suffers a substantial penalty. How much of a penalty? The curious thing is that when I raised this question in committee, the ministerial officials had not done any research on this topic. This very important factor is not taken into account in costing out this program and the rate of return. In other words, that 4.5% rate of return, which is already inadequate, is in fact illusory.

Something else happens. Because a plan like this is predictable in the amount of money that goes in and the amount of money that comes out, and we can look at actuarial tables, it is possible for other investors to predict when it will put money in and when it will take money out. They can, as the expression goes, “game the system”. They can plan to take advantage by holding back on assets when there is an attempt to buy in by flooding the market and making themselves buyers when the plan is tempted to sell out. That will result in still further reductions in the rate of return on the plan. This also is not taken into account.

As a final point I would like to note that despite the attempt, which I assume was designed to ensure that moneys would be captured within the Canadian capital market under this legislation, that is not what will happen. In fact, what will happen is that better informed investors that would have made wiser investments in the Canadian economy will be forced out by these large sums of money, and the result will be that no more money will go into the Canadian economy and it will go in in a less informed way.

[Canada Pension Plan, December 13th, 2002]

moved

That Bill C-3, in Clause 15, be amended by replacing lines 41 to 46 on page 9 and lines 1 to 5 on page 10 with the following:

“15. Section 37 of the Act is repealed.”

Mr. Speaker, I am here to discuss a very important amendment to Bill C-3, which is an act to amend the Canada pension plan and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act.

In general terms the bill is a disappointment, not so much for what it includes, which is on the whole unobjectionable, but for what it fails to include. It fails to include measures that would make the management board politician proof, that is completely secure from political interference, and it also fails to ensure that the Canada pension plan money that is invested through the investment board--and we are talking about an amount that will eventually total something in the nature of $100 billion--cannot be used for any purpose other than maximizing the rate of return for the beneficiaries of the Canada pension plan, which is the only purpose for which pension moneys should ever be invested and not, for example, some of the proposals that have been made in the course of the discussion of this bill.

Pension moneys should never be invested for the purpose of industrial or regional development, or for the furthering of ethical as opposed to other types of investments. If we choose to make the decision, for example, that we want to forbid the investment in certain areas, we ought to make it illegal to invest in certain areas. We ought not to lower the rate of return that the Canada pension plan earns by restricting it from investing in these areas.

These were all proposals that had been made, some of them by the former minister of finance, the member for LaSalle--Émard, who was the author of the bill.

The amendment I am proposing today is designed to eliminate one of these limitations, the most important of the limitations, upon the invested returns that the Canada pension plan can expect to earn through its investment board. This is the provision that forbids more than 30% of the moneys invested through the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board from being invested outside Canada.

Let me explain the technical aspects of the amendment I am proposing. I have referred in the amendment, in section 15 of the bill, to another section of another bill. The way section 15 currently is worded, it makes a series of changes to section 37 of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, a prior act that was passed several years ago. Section 37 of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act refers in turn to a section of the Income Tax Act which states that pension plans, whether they be corporate, union or registered retirement savings plans, are not permitted to invest more than 30% of their assets outside of Canada.

What I am proposing is to change section 15 of the act currently under consideration to now read, “Section 37 of the Act...”, that is of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, “...is repealed”, thereby removing the cap on the percentage that might be invested outside of Canada.

The reason for this is straightforward. The Canadian economy represents something between 2% and 3% of the total world economy. When a decision is made to restrict the percentage of the Canada pension plan moneys that can be invested outside of Canada, we make the decision to take that 70% of Canada pension plan money and require it to be invested in less than 3% of the world economy, and not, I might add, the fastest growing 2% to 3% of the world economy.

We make a decision therefore to reduce the rate of return that will be earned by that 70% of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board money. To give a sense of just how significant this is, in committee I asked the chief actuary of Canada, who was appearing as a witness, what the rate of return would be on the three main components of the Investment Board moneys.

The three components are a series of provincial government bonds which earn, quite frankly, a very unsatisfactory rate of return, largely because of a sweetheart deal that was cut with the provinces by the government and the former finance minister in order to secure the support of the provincial governments. This ensures that they will get a preferential, extra low rate of interest on the bonds that they sell to the Canada pension plan. This will result in billions of dollars, which should go into the pension plan and eventually be paid out to Canadian pensioners, being taken out instead and given to the provinces to be used on whatever projects they see fit.

The second component is the money that will be invested internationally. The expectation is that we will get a reasonably good rate of return; about 5.5%. The moneys that are invested in the Canadian equities market are anticipated to get about a 4.5% return. On that component, which is something in the neighbourhood of $25 billion to $30 billion, we should get a 1% lower rate of return out of the total capital per year. In fact, measured by comparison to the 5.5% rate of return, we can see it is substantially lower. It is about a 20% lower rate of return every year, year after year compounding, and therefore this will result in literally billions of dollars lost permanently to Canadian pensioners.

In the end, this will result in either the Canada pension plan having to hike its premiums yet further to well over 10% in order to pay for these benefits; or it will result in Canada pension plan benefits being cut so that pensioners will not get the moneys that they were promised. It may not happen to the current generation of pensioners, or at least those who are fairly well on in their senior years, but it will happen to those who are expecting to retire, as I am, some 30 years from now. They will almost certainly find themselves with a reduced--

[Parliament of Canada Act, December 10th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I am speaking today in response to Bill C-219, an act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act (oath or solemn affirmation). I am generally supportive of the principle of this act.

Just to repeat, the bill would add to the current oath that we as members of Parliament swear. The current oath is very brief. It simply says, “I”--and then the person would give his or her name--“do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second...”.

The bill proposes to add the following words to that oath, “I”--again the person would give his or her name--“do swear (or solemnly affirm) that I will be loyal to Canada and that I will perform the duties of a member of the House of Commons honestly and justly”.

When I was sworn in, in November 2000, I proposed a secondary oath very similar to the one proposed here in addition to the one that is required by law. About 50 or 60 other members of Parliament did the same thing. This was a practice followed by some members of Parliament in 1997 and some others following the 1993 election. Therefore, the tradition of swearing an oath that is not strictly legally binding but which we regard as being morally binding upon ourselves of swearing an oath to the people of this country and to the country itself, in addition to our oath to the Queen, has been developing and growing.

The bill proposed by the hon. member does retain the existing oath. As an enthusiastic supporter of the monarchy, I am very grateful to the hon. member for having kept that in. I think it is important, not merely because of my own support for the monarchy but because there is a value in maintaining and keeping our traditions. This includes the traditional forms of our government and the traditional forms of our oath. I do not think that one necessarily has to be a monarchist to swear the oath. As I will explain a bit later on, I believe that the Queen and the monarchy is and has been understood to be a symbol and a representation of the Constitution itself.

It is important, however, as we go through a debate like this, that one ought not to put too much weight in an oath itself as a separate institution from the two relevant factors that govern us in our actions as members of Parliament: first, the act of being elected legally; and, second, the act of performing our duties in conformity with the norms of our society, the norms of this place and of course the law of the land. A failure to take the oath or a failure to take the oath in a manner that is genuinely enthusiastic and wholehearted does not, it seems to me, mean that one should not be permitted to sit in the House of Commons.

When the Parti Quebecois was first elected in Quebec in 1976, many members of the new government found it very difficult to take the oath that was then in effect for members of the Quebec provincial legislature. The saying was that they took the oath with their fingers crossed behind their backs. The oath of office was subsequently changed to read, “I”--and the person would give his or her name--“do solemnly affirm that I will be loyal to the people of Quebec and that I will perform the duties of a member honestly and justly in conformity with the Constitution of Quebec”.

While that sounds different, it is really very similar in practice to the oath that exists in Canada at the federal level because, as I say, the Queen was understood in 1867 to be the representative, the keystone, of our Constitution. This simply was an attempt to modernize the wording. While I regret the fact that the monarch was taken out of the Quebec oath, I think the substance is the same.

Similarly, I think what the hon. member is attempting to do in his proposed bill is to expand the current oath by reaffirming in more modern language the sentiment that was at the heart of the 1867 oath. Therefore, the two parts of the oath, the one that has existed since 1867 and the one being proposed by the hon. member, it seems to me, are actually parts of the same package and reaffirmations of the same sentiment.

What is particularly important in our actions as members of Parliament is that we act in conformity with the norms that govern the behaviour of members of Parliament and that we act in a spirit that conforms with the Constitution of the country. I do think there is a danger that members of either the federal or provincial Houses can act in a manner that is in contempt of their oath.

Taking an oath and then not following through on it is a very serious offence. In the most serious cases, and these are of course extraordinarily rare, it amounts to a betrayal of the Constitution that one has taken an oath to maintain. This has happened in a number of countries. It has happened, for example, to many American senators, congressmen and representatives who were elected in the 1850s and the 1860s. They subsequently violated their oath to represent the constitution of the United States. That act was terrible, indeed it was treasonous, but that did not prevent them from taking that oath initially.

The important thing is that we must always remember the substance of our oath of office, whatever those words may be, and that we follow through on those words as we perform our duties as members of Parliament.

[Kyoto Protocol, December 9th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I noticed that what the hon. parliamentary secretary did not say was that his department would issue instructions to the RCMP to stop violating the Official Languages Act and start issuing tickets in both official languages in the Gatineau Park of the national capital region.

That is a requirement of the law. This is not a matter that can be put off. It is a matter that requires action. It is a matter that has been clearly stated in the law and it is a matter on which I am speaking in conformity with our leading guardian of official languages, the Commissioner of Official Languages. I cannot understand why there is any ambiguity about this and why there is any avoidance of simply saying that we will enforce the Official Languages Act by issuing tickets in both languages on the Quebec side as we do on the Ontario side of the national capital region.

I will ask the parliamentary secretary the question again. If he could just give me a yes or no that would be fine. Will the government instruct the RCMP to issue bilingual tickets in Gatineau? Yes or no.