Change ensures pension for MPS
The Liberals have quietly tabled a revision to the Elections Act that would have the effect of ensuring that more than two dozen MPS will qualify for gold-plated parliamentary pensions even if they lose the next election.
Under the terms of the current electoral law, Canada's next mandatory general election date is Oct. 20, 2025 — a function of the Elections Act requiring a general election to be held “on the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election.”
The revision — contained in a package of proposed amendments — is a one-time change moving the date one week later, to Oct. 27.
The stated reason for this is so election day won't fall amidst Diwali, the five-day Hindu festival of lights.
But shifting the date also ensures that a number of MPS first elected in 2019 — many of whom are New Democrats and Liberals projected to lose in 2025 — will just pass the six-year threshold required to qualify for a lifetime parliamentary pension that starts as early as age 55. This includes Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, Treasury Board President Anita Anand and both Heather Mcpherson and Matthew Green, the NDP MPS who were the loudest champions of Monday's attempt to have Canada recognize Palestinian statehood.
Among the other potential beneficiaries of the change are Jaime Battiste, parliamentary secretary to the minister of Crown-indigenous relations, and Jenica Atwin, who recently made headlines after a constituent emailed her about synagogue vandalism in her riding, and she replied with a lament about Gazan “atrocities.”
Many of the MPS represent relatively close ridings that are not projected to fare well amid plummeting electoral support for Liberal and NDP MPS.
Anand, for one, won her Oakville, Ont., seat in 2021 with just 28,137 votes against the 24,430 cast for her Conservative opponent. Guilbeault last won his Laurier— Sainte-marie riding in Montreal with a razor-thin 37.96 per cent of the vote.
Battiste, who represents the Nova Scotia riding of Sydney—victoria, skated into re-election in 2021 by a margin of just 1,084 votes.
For context, these MPS all won re-election in 2021 when the Liberals' share of the popular vote was 32.62 per cent as compared to 33.74 per cent for the Conservatives.
The latest available polls show that the next election will likely see the Conservatives capture 42 per cent to the Liberals' 24 per cent — a blowout result that would slash as many as 100 seats from the Liberal caucus.
The famously generous Members of Parliament Pension Plan is available only to former MPS who have “accumulated at least six years of pensionable service.”
As the 2019 federal election was held on Oct. 21, this means that any MPS first elected then won't qualify for the pension until Oct. 21, 2025 — exactly one day after the previously scheduled date of the 2025 election.
The cost to taxpayers of the one-week delay could easily stretch into the tens of millions of dollars.
In 2021, when Liberal MP Adam Vaughan resigned after just 6.7 years of service, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation calculated he stood to receive $1.3 million in pension benefits if he reached Canadian life expectancy. David Yurdiga, a Conservative MP who chose to resign after seven years in the Commons, was in line for $1.5 million of lifetime benefits.
When the Liberals tabled their Elections Act amendments before the House of Commons this week, Conservative MPS were among the first to notice that it just happened to push a chunk of the government benches into pension territory.
Conservative MP Damien Kurek uploaded an image to social media of the clause outlining the date change and cryptically wrote “anyone care to guess the reason?”
Notably, the date change will not make any difference to the pension eligibility of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
A popular right-wing theory holds that Singh is propping up the Liberal government primarily to pass his own six-year pension threshold. But Singh was first elected in a February 2019 byelection, and will be in the clear for a pension by Feb. 25 — eight months before the next mandatory vote.