The things the media picks for scandals. For months, the press has been filled with urgent little warnings about the "brain drain" in the federal public service, owing to the shockingly low salaries paid to senior managers. But when a certain senior manager, namely the head of the Canada Labour Relations Board, succeeds in raising his meagre wages by about $10,000 a year, suddenly it's a firing offence. True, he chose to be remunerated entirely in the form of expensive restaurant meals, but what business is that of ours?

Do we think civil servants should be paid more, or don't we?

In a similar vein, just about everyone agrees that the Senate is a wholly useless appendage, lacking either mandate or purpose in a democratic age.

Senators, it is well known, are a gaggle of aging party hacks, who fill their days snoring, speechifying and otherwise wasting time. But let one of those senators fail to show up for "work," and the nation talks of little else: The nerve of him, lazing about in Mexico. He should be lazing about in the Senate, where he belongs!

Actually, the Senate does much important work, and never more so than in the recent dustup over Bill C-2, the package of reforms to the Canada Pension Plan that emerged from federal-provincial negotiations earlier this year. Conservative senators had threatened to block the bill until after January 1, when the first in a series of increases in employer and employee contributions to the plan is supposed to kick in, but wisely agreed to let the legislation pass in exchange for the promise of public hearings on the bill's more troublesome provisions.

Senators, of course, might be expected to know a thing or two about pensions. And in exercising their function as the chamber of "sober second thought," the senators have homed in on the real danger posed by the bill.

Much though debate has focused on the proposed 73 per cent increase in contribution rates over the next six years, that is not really the issue. Under any serious reform, rates would have to rise, and sharply. How much of this is due to demographic shifts and how much to past mismanagement, it is a reality.

Nor is there much dispute that the surplus generated by the increase in contributions should be invested to better effect than in the past, when all funds in the CPP account were automatically lent to the provinces. In particular, that means ploughing a good part of the CPP fund into the stock market, where the returns on investment have historically proved superior to bonds. The issue is whether this should be entrusted to a single, government- appointed investment board, and if so, under what rules, with what degree of independence and to what ultimate purpose. It is these questions that the Senate proposes to examine.

The stakes, it must be underlined, are enormous. Prof. David Stager of the University of Toronto, in a paper for the C. D. Howe Institute, estimates the CPP investment fund could easily grow to $145-billion by 2005. That would make it three times as large as the next biggest public pension funds, Quebec's Caisse de Depot or the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. If it followed a typical asset allocation strategy, according to calculations by pension expert Keith Ambachtsheer, by 2016 the CPP would own 8 per cent of the Canadian money market, 15 per cent of the traded Canadian equity market, and 25 per cent of outstanding Canadian government bonds.

The legislation, to be fair, goes to some lengths to protect the fund, whether from political interference or reckless managers. Funds are to be invested for "the best interests of the beneficiaries," and no other purpose. Members of the investment board must be persons of "proven financial ability or relevant work experience," who would be held to the "prudent person" standard of fiduciary responsibility. And though they would be appointed by the Finance minister, this would be in consultation with the provinces, which presumably would prevent him from appointing his hairdresser.

All the same, there is still plenty of room for concern. Stager himself, though broadly supportive of the bill, allows that the federal and provincial governments "together could be very heavy handed in controlling the activities of the board." Though the board's initial instructions are to follow a "passive" investment strategy, meaning it would buy stocks across the board in proportion to their weight in the relevant market index, that provision expires after three years. Then all hell might break loose.

Once the board is given some discretionary leeway, will it not be exposed to charges that it is investing too much in one part of the country and not in another? Will not the very existence of such a large surplus lead to claims that some portion should be "put back" in the form of lower contributions, or higher benefits? Just how sturdy are the board's guarantees of independence?

As Stager notes, "the world record of government meddling and abuse of public sector pension funds sounds a note of alarm." Carry on, senators.