Finance committee  Thank you. It's good to be here this morning. Fifteen years ago in Canada we reformed pillars one and two of our retirement income system, OAS/GIS and CPP/QPP. Fifteen years later it's time to do something else. It's now time to move on to pillar three, which is the supplementar

Finance committee  The potential role the federal government can play in bringing all these things together is in fact to help flesh out the vision as to where we should be going, and as I say, it really revolves around putting three things together. One is to move to target-benefit plans. Another

Finance committee  The research shows that scale is very important. Bigger scale means lower unit costs. Delivering pensions at low cost is tremendously important, because if a lot of the returns are eaten up in costs, then there are no pensions. So in that sense, scale is important. As to whether

Finance committee  That is correct, unless you want to get into some kind of wealth transfer arrangement where you take money from one group and give it to some other group. If you want it to be one that is sort of transparent and fair and one in which you get what you pay for, then yes, it takes a

Finance committee  If you look at the pension system from a governance perspective, it's actually quite fragmented. We have some very fine large-scale institutions that are very well managed, and I would put the CPP Investment Board into that category. My recommendation, by the way, is not to expa

Finance committee  It seems there are two issues there. One relates to the scale: can you get too large? In principle, the answer has to be yes. The practical question is where that limit is. If you look at our large institutions managing $100 billion, on a global scale it's actually not very big.

Finance committee  I think you have to use standard reorganization principles. That is, if something doesn't work financially, how do you reorganize so it does work? There are certain rules that are followed in a corporate context--CCAA--in terms of reorganizing corporations, and we need to apply

Finance committee  My proposal is described in 16 pages. You're asking a question that would be on page 17. Clearly, there are a lot of specifics that would need to be put in place in order to press the go button on this. In my proposal, what I suggest is that the contributions start above $30,00

Finance committee  Here's my answer, and Monsieur Ménard may want to add to this. I have a serious problem with those people who say, why don't we just double the CPP and forget all this other stuff? So we move the contribution rate from basically 10% to 20% and drive on. That's a hugely complex is

Finance committee  If you go to a mandatory approach and if you have a target of doubling the CPP, then it has to get paid for. So if you want to call it a payroll tax, that's fine.

Finance committee  But my problem is the wealth transfer aspect. If you increase--double--the system, it doesn't stabilize for a long time, and on the way through the young are subsidizing the old, and I don't think that's fair.

Finance committee  We've done some research on this question of governance and the impact of governance on results, and there is in fact a statistically significant relationship. What you find is that when you put together a board, it needs to have a public service attitude and dimension, but it al

Finance committee  “Transparency” is an overused word, but the cost-effectiveness of delivery is tremendously important. Our research shows that between it being done well and being done poorly could be as much as 2% per year in terms of differential. Over a 40-year period, that basically means it

Finance committee  I agree with Mr. Raymond, actually. It's not that the CPP Investment Board isn't customer friendly, but they only have one customer. Once you start dealing with millions of individual Canadians, you need a very different communication model, for example. You need to do a number o

Finance committee  Yes, you would have the scale anyway.