Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Kevin Skerrett. I work as a senior research officer on pensions at the national office of CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees. In my role as researcher for the past 15 years, I've provided support to our locals and provincial sections dealing with pension issues, including collective bargaining.
We would first like to thank this committee for the opportunity to present to you today on Bill C-25. As we are all aware, this proposed legislation arrives in a period of very significant challenges for those of us working to defend, strengthen, and improve retirement security for Canadians.
CUPE is the largest trade union in Canada. We represent well over 600,000 workers, mostly in the public sector, but not entirely. While a majority of our members belong to secure defined benefit-type workplace pension arrangements, we have a significant minority, maybe about a third or 200,000 members, who do not have any workplace plan, or only have some form of defined contribution system or an RRSP.
I'll limit our comments today to three main issues. First of all, I'd like to strongly affirm our agreement with the written submission that was provided to the committee by our colleagues at the CLC. CUPE is the largest affiliate of the CLC. We feel that submission presents a powerful and comprehensive case that the basic design of the PRPP as represented in this legislation is fundamentally flawed.
Insofar as our common goal, the goal we all share, and the government's stated goal, is to enhance the current and future retirement security of Canadians, we do not see evidence that the introduction of a completely voluntary individual savings scheme, with absolutely no benefit security, will do anything to achieve this objective.
In contrast, the proven viable proposals from the CLC and other quarters for a fully funded and phased in doubling of the CPP at no cost to government budgets would greatly improve the pension and retirement prospects for those lower- and middle-income workers the current system is now failing.
This leads me to the second point we would like to make today, and that is about workplace pension arrangements. It is no secret that the defined benefit workplace pension plans that most of our members belong to, and many other workers, are under significant attack in both the private and public sectors.
In the private sector many of us have seen some high-profile cases where secure defined benefit arrangements with large employers—we think of Inco, U.S. Steel in Hamilton, the Royal Bank more recently, and even Air Canada last year—saw decent defined benefit-type arrangements replaced either entirely or partly with less secure defined contribution arrangements for newly hired employees. That's part of the landscape that is evolving.
Public sector workers, the bulk of our members, are also seeing pressures to give up secure benefits, often in the form of losses of indexation provisions—protection of the purchasing power of pensions.
In this context we believe that it is not only workers that have an interest in expanding the secure and efficient CPP, but also many employers. While most employer organizations will express opposition to expanding the CPP, we are convinced that many individual employers would in fact be supportive if an expanded CPP were recognized as an opportunity to rearrange their workplace-based pension arrangement and thereby reduce their cost and cost volatility.