Juno News - March 29, 2024


Liberal bill would give MPs tens of millions in extra pensions

Topics
pension eligibility changes MP pensions and political pressure carbon tax increase
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Chris Sims Franco Teresano Jody Wilson-Raybould Stéphane Guilbeault Stephen Harper Andrew Lawton Show Catherine McKenna Belinda Stronick Candace Malcolm Hurting Liberal Bloc Québécois Jagmeet Singh Pierre Poilievre Stockwell Day David Menzies Jane Philpott Steven Guilbeault Peter McKay Shakespearean and 6 more
GamerGate 2.0 is OUT OF CONTROL! Woke musicians push child mutilation

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

183.99

Word count

3,828

Sentence count

268

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The date of the next election has been set for October 20, 2025, but the Liberals want to push it back to October 27, 2025. What's the reason for this change? Is it because of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights? Or is it because the Liberals are worried about how many MPs they re going to lose their pensions?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Our fixed election date right now is on the books for October 2025.
00:00:14.300 Now, I didn't give a specific date there because this is subject to change.
00:00:20.340 Currently, the law says the election will be October 20th, 2025,
00:00:24.980 but the Liberals are tabling an amendment to this that will push that date to October 27th.
00:00:30.860 It will push it back seven days.
00:00:32.340 And you may think, okay, what's the big deal?
00:00:34.360 I don't even know what I'm doing for dinner tonight, let alone what I'm doing in October of 2025.
00:00:39.860 Well, why it matters is you have to look at the motivation.
00:00:43.700 Why is the Liberal government changing this?
00:00:45.660 Well, the Liberals say, and it's not untrue, by the way, that October 20th is the date of Diwali.
00:00:52.560 Now, Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights.
00:00:55.420 It's a very popular and very big celebration in the Hindu community.
00:00:59.340 A large enough group in Canada having this election on that holiday would be disruptive.
00:01:04.400 We move elections around for Jewish holidays and Christian holidays.
00:01:07.340 So that in and of itself is not inherently unbelievable,
00:01:10.440 but they could move it a week earlier.
00:01:13.160 They could move it two weeks earlier.
00:01:15.480 They chose to move it a week later.
00:01:17.920 Now, something happens between October 20th, 2025 and October 27th, 2025.
00:01:26.020 Something happens in that span of seven days.
00:01:30.320 And what you may ask, well, that's a fantastic question.
00:01:32.700 What happens is dozens more MPs become eligible for their gold-plated taxpayer-funded pensions.
00:01:40.460 Ah, yes, now it starts to become clear.
00:01:43.420 Well, no offense to the Hindus in our audience, no offense to observers of Diwali,
00:01:47.960 but I suspect your holiday has been less of an incentive for MPs to delay the election by one week
00:01:54.560 than this little detail about pensions has been.
00:01:59.420 And this is where we get into, I mean, what's the old Shakespearean line?
00:02:03.080 Aye, there's the rub.
00:02:04.360 Well, right here you have, and Canadian Taxpayers Federation and National Post both crunched the numbers on this.
00:02:09.880 But you have to, to be eligible for your MP pension, have six years of pensionable service.
00:02:16.380 Now, I was actually a little bit confused by this, and I spent much of my morning pouring over legislation.
00:02:22.420 So you'll forgive me if I have a glazed-over look in my eyes.
00:02:25.920 I haven't, like, ripped the glaze off from reading legislation for – it's not from donuts, it's from reading legislation.
00:02:31.080 But what happened is we saw that you needed six years of pensionable service.
00:02:37.060 Now, I didn't actually know how they calculated that, because MPs are elected on election day,
00:02:41.540 but they're often not sworn in for several weeks after that, maybe even more than a month.
00:02:47.480 Does pensionable service begin when you are elected or when you are sworn in?
00:02:52.900 I would have assumed when you're sworn in, because that is when your work begins.
00:02:57.280 And similarly, when Parliament dissolves, you cease to be a member of Parliament.
00:03:00.900 So do you stop amassing pensionable service time when Parliament's dissolved or on the election date if you lose?
00:03:08.820 Now, as it happens, it goes from election to election.
00:03:12.860 So even though you're not even serving as a member of Parliament for a good chunk of either end of that,
00:03:19.940 you're actually amassing pension credit in that time period.
00:03:24.840 Which means that, yes, six years, the amount of time it takes to qualify for your pension,
00:03:30.360 six years, is actually a threshold that dozens of MPs will cross between October 20th, 2025, and October 27th, 2025.
00:03:39.220 Now, the MPs we're talking about are the ones who were elected in the 2019 election.
00:03:44.020 Now, the elephant in the room here, most of those MPs were Conservatives,
00:03:49.180 because this was the election in which the Liberals,
00:03:51.560 which had a majority government from 2011 or from 2015 to 2019, were knocked down to a minority.
00:03:58.560 The Conservatives elected a couple of dozen more MPs.
00:04:01.700 The Liberals elected some new ones as well.
00:04:03.660 The Bloc Québécois, the NDP, there were lots of new faces.
00:04:06.320 Conservatives have most of this, but not all of it.
00:04:11.560 And why this is relevant is because you have here, I think, in a lot of the cases,
00:04:15.960 MPs that, look, the Conservatives aren't the ones changing the legislation.
00:04:19.040 The Conservatives are the ones that are just there.
00:04:22.440 The Liberals are the ones steering this ship.
00:04:24.180 But you have Liberals that are motivated, perhaps by realizing that they're not going to get much pushback
00:04:29.120 from MPs that are retiring, are going to lose.
00:04:33.480 I mean, right now, all the polling is showing that Conservatives are on track to win a supermajority,
00:04:38.840 which means that Liberals, NDP, and Bloc MPs all stand to lose a little bit in the next election.
00:04:46.340 So the MPs that were first elected in 2019 are getting very nervous right now.
00:04:50.900 They don't want to lose their pensions.
00:04:52.400 And you better believe, I think, they care more about that than they care about Diwali. 0.99
00:04:56.680 Chris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and joins me on the line.
00:05:02.560 Now, look, Chris, CDF has always been sounding the alarm about MP pensions.
00:05:06.920 These things are absolute sweetheart deals.
00:05:09.940 MPs get a better pension than pretty much anyone in the private sector in this country.
00:05:15.800 But the more insidious part is how you know that they make decisions based on eligibility.
00:05:23.460 Like, I know people make the criticism, and no one can prove what's in someone's mind.
00:05:28.040 But I'm convinced that Jagmeet Singh is motivated by his own pension eligibility in terms of keeping the government alive.
00:05:34.600 Yeah, exactly.
00:05:35.580 We don't want to, you know, dance around this.
00:05:38.100 We put out the news release, Franco Terrazano and his team there in Ottawa did an immense amount of work calculating these potential pensions.
00:05:45.080 And again, this is the upper limit, right?
00:05:47.520 It's the parameter that if all of them lost their seats, which is highly unlikely, this is how much the taxpayers would be on the hook for.
00:05:55.560 So that's the mathematical part.
00:05:57.560 But we have to notice the forest along with the trees here.
00:06:01.160 And of course, this would play into somebody's decision whether or not they want to, say, continue to support the Trudeau government.
00:06:07.900 If they're going to be lined up for a big pension in just a few more days, why not just hang in there?
00:06:13.840 There are very few members of Parliament who've been able to withstand that temptation, credit where it's due.
00:06:21.340 The former Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a big hit on his personal pension.
00:06:26.220 I can't remember how much money it was, but it was big time, like seven figures, something like that, over his lifetime for his pension.
00:06:33.440 So there are some members of Parliament who do walk the talk, and they are in it for pension reform, but they're pretty few and far between.
00:06:41.960 Yeah, and I'll give those numbers you just alluded to that Franco crunched here.
00:06:47.000 There are 80 members of Parliament who will become eligible in that week, who will become eligible on October 21st, 2025, 80 of them.
00:06:56.320 Now, of those, I think it's about 30 or 33 that were Conservative.
00:07:00.240 So most of them, very few Conservatives are saying they're not running again.
00:07:04.640 A handful are.
00:07:05.360 So most of them, given these polling numbers, are probably going to be staying around.
00:07:09.720 But even if you look at the 50 of Liberals that aren't running again or will lose, NDPers who aren't running again or will lose, Bloc Québécois, these are all folks that will amass collectively tens of millions of dollars just by moving that election one week.
00:07:24.540 Yeah, exactly. And imagine that temptation.
00:07:28.180 And so, again, folks need to remember that quite a member of Parliament will start getting a pension once they reach a certain age.
00:07:35.180 And then you just do the basic calculation from there.
00:07:37.900 You decide, you know, how long are they going to live past then?
00:07:40.940 Sorry to be grim, but that's what we have to do with mathematics and calculations.
00:07:43.980 It's not personal.
00:07:45.460 You know, are they going to live to 80, 85, 90?
00:07:47.640 And then you go through all the different numbers of MPs and that's how you do this math.
00:07:52.160 And so I think that's why it's really important that Franco put out this piece this morning.
00:07:56.080 So, yes, we understand the politics and the chess match that is happening right now.
00:08:00.220 But we also understand the math and the cost to taxpayers behind it.
00:08:04.700 I think I just saw before we jumped on here, did the opposition leader, Pierre Polyev, call this bluff and say that, no, let's move it up even earlier.
00:08:13.480 So we don't run in to the religious ceremony and festival, but you're still not hitting the pension date.
00:08:19.960 I think I saw that.
00:08:22.520 Yeah, I guess I'm just a little bit.
00:08:25.340 Well, take a step back.
00:08:27.100 How do you think that plays out?
00:08:29.620 Have to see, right?
00:08:30.960 So this is it.
00:08:32.640 So, OK, taking off my CTF hat a little bit here.
00:08:35.980 I was on Parliament Hill working there through a couple of different political blow ups, you'd call it.
00:08:41.660 So I remember when suddenly the Canadian Alliance, a lot of people within the Canadian Alliance lost faith in their leader Stockwell Day and a lot of party stalwarts got up and left and they went and sat by themselves.
00:08:55.720 I remember when Belinda Stronick, who actually ran for party leader, it's not like she was just some random no-name backbencher, when she dramatically crossed the floor. 0.98
00:09:04.560 We all got to see Peter McKay with his dog in his potato field.
00:09:07.980 Like, politics sometimes isn't boring.
00:09:09.940 My point of all of this is, is before that happened, everything seemed fine.
00:09:15.900 So on the surface, the duck is cool and calm and collected, but underneath the surface, they're just going like this.
00:09:22.480 And so everything's fine until it suddenly isn't.
00:09:26.080 And so the same way that we saw the carbon tax vote, getting all of those members of Parliament on the record, yay or nay, are you for or against the carbon tax increase?
00:09:34.680 That was pressure.
00:09:36.680 And I think, if I can just put on my hat a little bit here, I think that's what they're doing with this.
00:09:41.820 He's calling a bluff.
00:09:42.880 It's kind of a gangster move.
00:09:44.760 And he's going to try to get everybody on the record whether or not they want to move the vote day.
00:09:50.140 And so, again, that's more pressure that's increasing on this hull.
00:09:53.940 And so I think that's why they're doing that.
00:09:57.160 Yeah.
00:09:57.400 And again, I gave my little civics one.
00:10:00.020 Candace Malcolm always calls me the in-house political scientist because I just have a tendency to take all of these like salacious political topics and just frame them in the most boring technical terms possible.
00:10:08.680 But I've said at any time there could be an election, so we're not bound by this.
00:10:13.340 But that supply and confidence agreement with the NDP and the Liberals has been pretty ironclad so far.
00:10:19.280 I mean, Justin Trudeau, I'm convinced, and you and I have spoken about this before, that he's a burn-it-all-down-on-the-way-out kind of prime minister.
00:10:26.520 I actually don't think he cares about his MPs' pensions.
00:10:29.240 I think that he wants to just pick the moment that's going to be best for him.
00:10:32.720 And if it costs a few dozen Liberal MPs their pensions, so be it.
00:10:37.860 I don't think he cares.
00:10:39.220 But I do think it says a lot about the entitlement mentality you see in the House of Commons and you see among MPs.
00:10:45.880 And look, I'm not going to say conservatives are immune.
00:10:48.260 I mean, there were a lot of these fire-breathing reformers that were elected in the 90s and then alliance candidates in 2001 that were big crusaders against this sort of stuff but then benefited from it the second they were in the door.
00:11:01.900 They sure did, and a lot of them were part of a majority government, and we didn't see a lot of dramatic reform.
00:11:08.640 Again, credit where it's due, we did see some.
00:11:11.180 Some folks are pretty sticklers to their principles, and so we did see some.
00:11:16.120 But no, this has got nothing to do with the color of the jersey.
00:11:19.120 This has got everything to do with power and money.
00:11:22.220 And in this case, those who are currently holding on to power are in line for an awful lot of money for the rest of their lives.
00:11:31.700 If only they move this little election date up just a little bit further.
00:11:36.800 And so we'd be naive.
00:11:37.960 We'd be silly to think that this does not play a role here.
00:11:41.080 Sure. You mentioned Prime Minister Trudeau in this sense, and this is where I wanted to bring it back to political activism and peaceful grassroots activism.
00:11:50.920 I was describing all the pressure these MPs are under, and we're seeing that with polls, right?
00:11:55.700 We're seeing that with these votes.
00:11:57.520 Another element for real is the pressure they're getting from constituents.
00:12:01.220 And it's not just coming from Taxpayers Federation writers, but a lot of it is.
00:12:05.620 If they keep getting this pressure from their constituents, right?
00:12:08.880 So their middlebencher and backbencher MP.
00:12:11.700 If they're getting a call from Mary and Joseph and Sahil from their constituencies saying,
00:12:18.460 Hey, man, I can barely afford this.
00:12:21.040 I can't pay my hydro bill.
00:12:22.580 I can't fill up my minivan and take my kids to school.
00:12:25.040 I'm voting against you unless you smarten up.
00:12:28.520 That really rings bells with these MPs.
00:12:31.940 And what I'm hearing, some scuttlebutt from Parliament Hill, is that apparently, I don't know if this is true,
00:12:39.040 apparently the Prime Minister is tuning out of his caucus more than he has before.
00:12:45.460 And this has been a pretty late development.
00:12:48.940 And regardless of political party, once a leader starts doing that and tuning out the people who are part of his team,
00:12:56.560 if that's happening, things start getting bumpy.
00:13:00.080 And so this is, again, why I would encourage people.
00:13:02.340 And I would say the same thing if it was another party that was screwing you over on your taxes and trying to take your money.
00:13:07.220 This is why it's important to keep up the pressure right now.
00:13:11.280 Right now.
00:13:11.980 Continue to do that.
00:13:12.720 Yeah, and we had heard something to that effect when the Liberals had their caucus retreat in London,
00:13:18.820 which I only know of through other reporting because, as we perhaps recall, I was banned from covering it,
00:13:24.320 even though it was, you know, like five minutes from my house or whatever.
00:13:26.400 Were you kicked out of the city?
00:13:27.740 Or were you allowed to stay in?
00:13:29.540 Were you banned?
00:13:29.920 No, I was allowed to maintain my residency in London. 0.90
00:13:32.440 They didn't go full, like, G20 on me and, like, shit me out.
00:13:35.640 They didn't give me the old David Menzies and drive me out to the outskirts and dump me in a parking lot or anything. 0.78
00:13:40.320 But they did say, you know, you're not welcome here, and that's fine. 0.98
00:13:44.280 Well, it's not fine, but I'm just moving on to what I wanted to say here, which was that we heard that Liberal MPs were quite frustrated with the status quo in their party.
00:13:54.640 And, again, how they have been so silent.
00:13:57.520 I mean, hurting Conservatives is very, very, very difficult.
00:14:01.760 I mean, Stephen Harper was probably the best at it, and even he had a lot of trouble with caucus members that were just a little bit rambunctious.
00:14:08.720 Hurting Liberal, they are a conformist people.
00:14:11.480 They fall in line.
00:14:13.360 He has kept that caucus tight.
00:14:15.860 There has only really been one criticism of him that is by someone who's still in that caucus, and that was a no-name Quebec MP.
00:14:23.300 Others, like the second there's a bit of dissent, they're out the door.
00:14:26.460 Jody, Jane Philpott, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Selena Cesar Chavans, and as a result, everyone else just shuts up.
00:14:33.480 Yes, until recently, and until the carbon tax, which is, again, why I think this pressure is so important.
00:14:41.140 And I keep coming back to it.
00:14:42.460 I know we're geeking out here politically speaking, but the fact that the Atlantic caucus of the Liberal Party said, hey, Trudeau, we're not going to be paying this carbon tax here, boy.
00:14:53.500 Like, all of our constituents are really mad at us.
00:14:56.460 We've been hearing about it over the summer.
00:14:59.060 And again, I have family there.
00:15:00.560 I lived there.
00:15:01.480 Okay?
00:15:01.720 I know the culture.
00:15:02.740 All of those little gatherings over the summer, they still call them box socials, I'm not kidding, and the picnics and all that stuff.
00:15:11.200 They would have been hearing from a lot of their hardcore Liberal Party supporters in Atlantic Canada, and they got an earful.
00:15:18.720 And they turned around and gave Prime Minister Trudeau an earful.
00:15:21.640 And magic, he carves out a carbon tax exemption for their primary home heating fuel, which, of course, is oil.
00:15:30.000 So for him to blink on that showed that there is a division within that caucus, that he will cave to pressure, and he had to admit that the carbon tax is a financial burden to people.
00:15:41.840 So that was a major move.
00:15:44.500 And the fact that the Environment Minister, Stéphane Guilbeault, was not at that meeting, I think that's the crack in the armor.
00:15:51.320 So I would encourage everybody, just go at that and put pressure on that fissure.
00:15:56.340 We have a super chat from Marco here.
00:15:58.960 He says, why is everybody against the Liberals?
00:16:00.680 They made my house the best asset I have.
00:16:02.760 Yes.
00:16:03.940 You're one of those wealthy homeowners just because of inflation and all of that stuff.
00:16:09.780 You mentioned Stéphane Guilbeault, Chris.
00:16:11.420 Let me play this clip of, well, let's just let the clip speak for itself here.
00:16:16.880 The plan that your government laid out post-2019, the 2019 election, got us to 2030, and the targets that you've set out to 2030.
00:16:25.580 And that is when the price on carbon will reach $170 a tonne.
00:16:29.880 Do you intend for that price to continue to go up, since you do see this as such an integral part of your climate policy, beyond 2030 to help Canada reach its 2050 target?
00:16:38.660 So we haven't made a decision on that.
00:16:41.820 We've started consultation to prepare the next phase of emission reduction, so post-2030 in Canada, in fact, going to 2035.
00:16:50.040 Those consultations are ongoing.
00:16:52.520 Canada will need to make a determination by next year, as per our United Nations commitment to set those new targets for 2035.
00:17:02.680 We will need to do that by next year, by 2025.
00:17:06.140 There's no decision that has been made yet, other than we will continue increasing the price on pollution.
00:17:11.220 Oh, we don't yet know.
00:17:14.600 Again, a lot of things here that are important to caveat, such as are the Liberals going to be in power in 2030?
00:17:21.220 I don't know.
00:17:21.600 I mean, theoretically, even if they lose in 2025, they could be back in 2030.
00:17:25.380 Crazy things happen.
00:17:26.240 I do love the profound irony here of him giving a lecture on global warming while he's, like, puffed up like the blueberry girl in Willy Wonka.
00:17:35.460 Like, basically, he's on the verge of just taking off off the ground he's so puffy while talking about how we need to tax more because it's so warm outside.
00:17:43.740 Yeah, it's late March, and you're basically jigglypuff there with your big giant parka.
00:17:48.240 But nevertheless, what do you make of that?
00:17:51.080 I mean, literally, this is an infinite carbon tax and an infinitely increasing carbon tax.
00:17:56.360 Yeah, I was noticing his downfilled, likely downfilled parka there, too.
00:18:00.420 It looks pretty chilly.
00:18:02.060 I would bring us back to the former environment minister.
00:18:05.940 So Catherine McKenna, famously, before an election, said they had no plans to increase their carbon tax past $30 a ton.
00:18:14.760 Remember that?
00:18:15.760 Feels like it should be, like, with old-timey music and, like, sepia tone, right?
00:18:19.700 And then magic, as soon as the election was over, up it went.
00:18:23.680 And they announced it to $170 a ton.
00:18:27.400 So, folks, regardless of political party, again, I hate to break this to people, but I think I need to because we're getting some feedback of, oh, well, look at the rebates.
00:18:35.780 Look at the rebates.
00:18:36.480 You're richer for it.
00:18:37.180 So, politicians sometimes don't tell the truth.
00:18:42.000 They do this so often that we have a mascot for them that looks a lot like that Italian fable of the wooden boy who couldn't tell the truth and his nose kept growing.
00:18:51.080 So, they do this.
00:18:53.180 And so, for him to say, oh, well, we'll have to wait and see.
00:18:56.160 Yeah, wait and see.
00:18:57.500 So, I think in this case, you just need to look back at his previous work history and his current behavior as environment minister.
00:19:04.940 And will they continue to increase the price, the carbon tax or the price on carbon or whatever they want to call it?
00:19:11.840 You know, is water wet?
00:19:13.980 Of course they will.
00:19:15.340 Like, of course they will.
00:19:16.340 The only thing that would stop them, I think, is a strong rebuke from their own constituents.
00:19:22.600 Again, we would have to crack through that fissure of influence, I think, and get through to those members of parliament and get those members of parliament to convince their prime minister to change his ways on this.
00:19:34.900 To say, hey, people are broke.
00:19:36.800 They can't afford anything anymore.
00:19:38.960 We have to, you know, call a spade a spade and do a full retreat on this.
00:19:43.120 I'm always an optimist.
00:19:44.680 I actually think that that risk is not zero.
00:19:47.560 I do think the politicians do change their mind when they realize their own job is on the line.
00:19:52.020 This could happen because the NDP in British Columbia used to rail against the carbon tax, and now they love it that they're in government.
00:20:00.400 The NDP here in Alberta imposed a carbon tax on Albertans without warning, and now most of their political candidates...
00:20:08.160 Oh, yeah, they're all scrambling to see who can oppose it the most.
00:20:10.780 Yeah.
00:20:10.860 Yeah, right?
00:20:11.720 So just, you know, if you don't like the politics, wait five minutes, right?
00:20:15.160 So I do still think that there's a chance of that, but we need to keep that clip because we need to remember what Gebo said there.
00:20:21.720 In the future.
00:20:23.300 All right.
00:20:24.080 And if you are missing any feathers from your duvet, check Stephen Gilbo's jacket.
00:20:28.840 All right.
00:20:30.060 Chris Sims, Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:20:33.680 Always a pleasure.
00:20:34.440 We will see you next Monday because it's Easter Monday, but we'll make it up somehow.
00:20:38.160 Thanks so much.
00:20:39.120 Have a happy Easter.
00:20:39.940 Bye-bye.
00:20:40.400 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:20:42.300 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.