I understand the guarantee fund notion, but if you look at the track record of Ontario's Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund, which pales in comparison with what the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has seen in the United States, I understand that the guarantee fund in Ontario currently takes in about $48 million a year in assessments from those very pension plans covered by that fund. I'd be quick to point out that not every pension plan is covered by the guarantee fund. The public sector plans are not, for example.
The concern we have is what you're starting to see now, that the Government of Ontario has just pumped in, I think, about $250 million and has just promised another $500 million in last week's budget. Those are taxpayers' dollars they're committing to the guarantee fund to help backstop the pension plans that are having difficulties.
You can empathize with the pensioners who find themselves in that situation. Quite frankly, we don't believe that the guarantee fund in Ontario is a properly self-insured arrangement. We don't believe that it works the way it was perhaps originally intended to, and that's why we're publicly on record as opposing any further expansion of the guarantee fund in Ontario or elsewhere in Canada.
We would prefer to see efforts made to improve and enhance the funding of pension plans that would be affected by the guarantee fund's defined benefit plans. There are a number of funding and other issues relating to that, which we could get into at another time, but we would actually like to see better funded pension plans, and then you don't have the need for the guarantee fund.
Obviously, there are other issues that we can talk about in terms of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, or perhaps this other arrangement that the Expert Commission on Pensions in Ontario suggested, about managing the funds of an insolvent company, but again, those are other issues for another discussion perhaps.