Industry committee  Good morning. My name is Mike Powell. I am the president of the Canadian Federation of Pensioners. CFP's 23 member organizations advocate directly for over 300,000 defined benefit pensioners, and our allies represent millions more. We support Bill C-253 and the extension of sup

Industry committee  Part of it goes to the.... If pensions were granted superpriority, the companies would make different decisions about their pensions. It would become a real obligation. Everybody knows today that if you file for insolvency, your pension obligation disappears like a wisp of smoke.

Industry committee  I guess the answer to that is history. The Indalex case in Ontario found that the pension was actually a deemed trust, a much higher priority than superpriority, and there was no wave of insolvencies. The lenders and borrowers worked it out. The other thing to keep in mind is th

Industry committee  No other country has the same legislative environment as Canada. Does any country have our exact solution? Probably not. If you look at the United States, for example, you see that it has a pension benefit guaranty corporation. That's a national entity that guarantees pensions.

Industry committee  The one thing is that there are limits to what you can do within the provinces because of the jurisdictional issues. Basically, a pension can be registered in one province or federally, and the business can be regulated somewhere else. What you're talking about crosses those two

Finance committee  Thank you. We've submitted the specific changes we believe need to be made to Bill C-228, so I won't discuss those here. I will be talking about some of the points included in the submission that we made supported by CFP and five other leading Canadians seniors' advocacy organ

Finance committee  Yes, I do, to both of those. Again, I want to reiterate the point that pensions are very well funded right now, and if we act quickly, we can take advantage of that opportunity.

Finance committee  Yes, we actually got involved with the House of Commons committee petition that Ryan Turnbull sponsored. There were 12,332 Canadians who signed on, saying that pension protection was important to them. We've also, at CFP, run some email campaigns, the most recent in support of B

Finance committee  I have to confess that my undergrad is in engineering, so that's my view in life. I think you go to the data. I would issue a challenge. WEPP was implemented in 2005. At that time, these same industries, these same groups, made the same claim that disaster was going to occur. Th

Finance committee  Again, when we talk about risk, the companies have a lot of resources to manage the risk. I will go back to the data. When you look at the percentage of companies that routinely and normally underfund their pensions, it's a matter of choice. It's not because they have to; it's be

Finance committee  I'm sorry. I had a lot to go through, so I was speaking quickly. In 2005, the Wage Earner Protection Program Act was passed, and the wage earner protection program gave superpriority to unpaid wages, unpaid expenses and some other things. The issue is that.... If you make somet

Finance committee  Yes. It was Bill C‑55. It was debated in 2005 and passed. I don't have the date in front of me, but it was passed in 2005.

Finance committee  It covered different things. Because it's about wage earners, and every company going through insolvency has employees, it has impacted every insolvency since its implementation. When we look at this, we're talking about the 9%. You're only looking at those companies that becom

Finance committee  It's really complicated. For simplification, the new purchaser wouldn't take over the entire responsibility. They agreed to put a stream of funding into it. If Stelco made over a certain percentage of profit, the pensions were given a stream out of that. They were also given a p

Finance committee  I don't know.