Madam Speaker, I am honoured to give a speech on this bill. I would also like to thank the member for Manicouagan for her bill on this very important topic.

Retirement security is a very important issue. Seniors' overall financial security is an even more important issue for Conservatives.

I agree that there is a problem with our pensions at the moment, but I do not agree with the solution put forward in this bill.

I do not support this bill because it will create more problems for businesses in financial crisis.

Last year, I introduced Bill C-405, which deals with this issue. Neither the Bloc Québécois nor the other parties supported my bill, which is a shame because my bill did not create problems for small businesses.

There were fewer problems with Bill C-405, which I introduced, because while we can agree that there is a problem with underfunded pension liabilities for pension plans, not the contribution-based plans but the defined benefit plans, when the pension is underfunded, we know it is a problem if there is insolvency of a company.

If we changed the bankruptcy laws to a point where we caused more companies at risk to become insolvent, to liquidate, the solution being proposed by the Bloc would actually be worse than what they are trying to cure, even though we are in agreement.

My bill tried to address the issue of underfunded pension liabilities without the impact that changing the bankruptcy laws for Canada and the insolvency laws in the CCAA would do.

My bill would have ended the unfairness of excessive payments that exacerbate pension shortfalls. It would have helped protect workers wanting to retire by giving administrators options to protect and improve the pension funds.

Furthermore, my bill would have increased transparency and accountability by improving the national reports on the solvency of pension plans. It proposed a lot of solutions, without any of the problems caused by Bill C-372.

There is a way to tackle the public policy challenges of underfunded defined contribution pension plans without causing harm to businesses that are in financial distress, which will not be able to receive financing if they have an underfunded pension, because they will not be loaned money by creditors. I agree with the MP's public policy issue here, but we have to have a solution that does not cause disruptions in her province, in my province and across the country.

One interesting point the member may not know is that Ontario has a pension benefits guarantee fund. We have talked a lot about Sears employees. Some of the Sears employees, in Ontario at least, will get assistance from the pension benefits guarantee fund. Other provinces do not have that, so it would be unfair to Ontario, which funds and backstops a pension benefits guarantee fund, to change national insolvency legislation.

I worked as a lawyer on the insolvency and the protection process for Air Canada, which I know that member thinks highly of as our national carrier, based in Montreal. I was at the law firm Stikeman Elliott, which represented Air Canada in its restructuring, and it successfully restructured, as many MPs will know when they take Air Canada back to their provinces later today.

CCAA puts a focus on restructuring, not on liquidating. Restructuring a company saves all the jobs; saves the pension by keeping it a going concern; makes all the suppliers whole, for the most part, or tries to; and keeps that business operating. In the case of Air Canada, restructuring kept it in place to provide an important service that a lot of Canadians use. Therefore, our focus when companies are in trouble must be to help the company survive.

If the company survives, the pension fund is fine. If the company does not survive, then the liquidation will take place, and even if we applied superpriority to pensions, with most companies it would still only amount to pennies on the dollar or a much-reduced pension outcome. My bill, Bill C-405, tried to give pension administrators the ability to keep that fund going within another fund so that the pensioners who were stranded could get the upside of an existing fund through the pooling of resources and the ability for their returns to go up.

In an insolvency, all the pension administrator can do is buy an annuity. As a result, those pensioners will be locked into a far lower annuity payment amount, because that annuity has to be purchased at a time when the markets are likely bad, and it will basically guarantee a bad outcome for pensioners.

What is the solution? It is to keep companies operating. CCAA's focus is on maintaining those companies as going concerns, as well as their pensions and their employees.

Let us take out some of the abuse. Bill C-405 proposed to take out some of the abuse occurring through key employee retention plan payments, whereby companies give large executive payments that seem to drain the company of resources while the pension was underfunded. Bill C-405 also tried to work with provincial securities regulators to make sure that there was a national health report on pensions each year. Canada already produces one, but it does not collaborate with the provinces, where most of these pensions are administered. The federal government can change insolvency legislation, but these are actually, in many cases, provincial pension funds.

Sears Canada had its assets hollowed out by its main shareholder in the United States, thereby stripping out resources that could have been used for the pension. In cases like Sears, some of those actions could be prevented by securities laws and securities regulation, so my approach was also to have a report in which all levels of government and security commissions would look at ways to prevent the stripping out of resources.

A lot of people out there, including great people at the Canadian Federation of Pensioners, CARP and others, see changing our bankruptcy and insolvency laws as a magic bullet. It is not. I do not think anyone wants to see more companies driven into liquidation. We want to see them survive, but how can we backstop and preserve payments to these pensioners?

I think there is a way to do it without the negative consequences of superpriority, as it is called. Why do I know that this approach is better? It is because multiple governments at multiple levels have never fulfilled on pension superpriority, and even bills here in this Parliament are coming late in the session, because the studies have shown that more companies will go under as a result. We want the companies to survive so that the jobs and the pensions are preserved, which is what CCAA and restructuring legislation are about.

I want to thank the member for her bill and thank her for the opportunity to speak to the elements of the issue that I agree with her is an issue we have to tackle.

Erin O'Toole

$226,409.00