Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am going to be brief in my address to this bill. I will be supporting the bill and for different reasons. I am not about to stand here and try and convince my colleagues or anybody else to vote for the bill or vote against the bill. I think we have to make up our own minds and have our own reasons for supporting or voting against the bill.
I know there have been many arguments put out against this and it will be controversial. However, in looking back as to how this pension surplus came to be and why it is there, you have to give some consideration to the fact that the Members who chose to cut back on their pensions to lead by example, so they could save money for the government and maybe put it to where it was more needed because there was a $100 million deficit, well, obviously if those same Members today had to do it all over again, they may vote differently on that. Obviously that money just could not be dipped into and put back into the general coffers and put to health and social services or put to education or wherever you wanted to put it.
The money could not be touched. Now there is a pension surplus there that has to be addressed. We could vote this bill down. That money is going to stay there because as soon as we try to touch it as a government to put it somewhere else, there is going to be a court case and the lawyers will get the money or somebody else will get the money.
I think we have to deal with this issue. I do not look at it as a huge financial benefit for me. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I worked for 28 years for Canadian National Railways with a pension plan. When I finished that job, I took my pension plan and reinvested it into a long-term pension plan, so it is not a live or die situation for me.
I do believe, Mr. Speaker, that we have a responsibility to look after Members of this Legislative Assembly that come after us. I think they are entitled to a good pension. I sometimes find it hard to justify when a hockey player is making $5 million a year or $50 million in five years, and they justify it by saying that maybe in five years, they will not have the health to be a hockey player.
Well, maybe in four years or two years, I will not have the support to be here as an MLA, but I hope that it does not come down to whether I vote for this pension or not because I am trying to get rich, because it will not matter with this little amount that we are talking about.
I think we do have a responsibility to deal with this issue, get it off the books because there will always be a temptation for this government to dig into a pension pot and try to put that money somewhere else. There will be an uproar when that happens.
Mr. Speaker, I know in working for industry with a bargaining unit that went to the table and bargained for me every two or three years, or whenever the contract was up, one of the issues was a pension. Every year, it was a big pension issue. It is very easy to sit back as an employee and you have an elected negotiator to go in for you and raise all the issues that have to be addressed, and everybody sits back and says "I hope our negotiator gets us a better pension" or "I hope they get us higher wages. We can take it because somebody else is saying it for us."
Nobody is going to say it for us in this Assembly. Nobody is going to be out there saying that we have to get better wages or better pensions or whatever benefits as a whole. Maybe it is one of the ugly things at this job that we have to speak for ourselves and try to make it better, either for ourselves or people coming behind us. I think the pension issue is one of these issues. The surplus is there. It is going to be going back into a pension. I do not see it as a huge financial windfall for any Member here to address that surplus pension issue and make it better for all Members. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.