A delegation consisting of Dan Albas, MP for the riding of Okanagan - Coquihalla, is scheduled to appear before this Thursday’s RDOS Corporate Services Committee meeting to inform the committee regarding recent budget changes that increase the age of eligibility for old age pensions to 67 years old.
We wonder what Mr. Albas will be able to say to make the budget change more palatable to the committee.
We strongly suspect there will be nothing new revealed in Mr. Albas’ comments.
We feel that Mr. Albas cannot justify the raising of OAP age for the simple reason that he made no effort to staunch the unreasonably generous flow of the public’s money into his publically funded pension plan.
This is not a personal matter - Alex Atamanenko, MP for BC Southern Interior, should be joining Mr. Albas in the committee room this Thursday.
There should not be any respite for our federal politicians from public wrath over this issue.
A lame promise to take some action on MP pension plans after this parliament is simply not good enough.
There should not be any peace when politicians insist on elevating themselves to a higher status level where fewer economic rules apply than to the rest of us.
As we have noted before, this is an issue that transends political boundaries. The basis of reasoning from which the present sitting of parliament has earned our eternal wrath can be best explained by recalling a portion of the famous comment used by Brian Mulroney against John Turner during the leaders debate in the 1984 Canadian federal election. The exchange has been considered one of the great “knockout blows” in the history of Canadian political debate, and the phrase could just as successfully be applied to our parliamentarians as a whole regarding the issue of MP pension reform:
“You had an option, sir. You could have said, ‘This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.’
You had an option, sir. You could have done better.”