Industry committee  No. Exactly as Tony said, we were very firmly told, “Don't worry”. There were a lot of people who were very concerned and they were looking for other employment. At that time the economy was much better, and if they had left, they would have landed much better on their feet. They

Industry committee  I started basically out of school, so I was around 22.

Industry committee  No.

Industry committee  It's a difficult one. You come out of school and want to work for a good employer. You plan to work for that employer for the rest of your life because it's a company with a good pension plan and those kinds of things. Unfortunately, with the way the markets have changed, investm

Industry committee  I can add a few more comments. I think that would be a favourable opportunity. As some will be aware, the Ontario pension guarantee has stepped up to help with the Nortel pension, but a westerner or anybody outside of Ontario doesn't have those same protections. They're still g

Industry committee  No other group is more deeply affected emotionally, financially, and psychologically by a bankruptcy than the employees of that company. I doubt you can fathom the heart-wrenching fear and panic that employees undergo at the moment they hear their employer has filed for creditor

Finance committee  A bad situation is developing there. They've used accounting principles to minimize the cash in the Canadian estate and right now the majority, as Melanie was saying, is in the U.S. estate. They had $2.4 billion cash. Nortel Canada has always been a research and development centr

Finance committee  There are possibilities. There are provisions in the NAFTA agreement that could allow equalization between the U.S. estate and the Canadian estate, if our government supports us in forcing that. We could force equal resolution. There are terms in NAFTA--I can provide them to you-

Finance committee  We have to have the preferred status to make the company more cognizant of this, and then they're less likely to induce a bankruptcy to make profits. But if we leave it open, they can keep doing this, and $1.2 billion off your books is pretty darn good in comparison to other opti

Finance committee  We have to do something sooner rather than later to ensure that companies stop going into bankruptcy just to avoid these costs, right? Nortel saved $165 million on our side on pensioners and over $1.2 billion on other sides by stepping away from these obligations. So we have to d

Finance committee  Yes, in Alberta, there is no pension guarantee fund, so the 69% that we were talking about will be all an Alberta pensioner will ever receive. I think there's generalized comfort in doing something like that, especially trying to vest Nortel's pension at this point when the mar

Finance committee  As long as there are other rules around it, the quality of the investments and other things, and as long as we had a regulated method to control those pension plans and ensure they were safer than they were privately held, absolutely, I fully agree with that. Anything that will a

Finance committee  They always talk about the cost of credit, right? If you put the bankruptcy amendments in there, it's going to make people less likely to invest in companies and it would hurt the business interests in Canada. But as Melanie has proposed, that's less than a 16% impact in countr

Finance committee  Federal bankruptcy overrules all provincial legislation, and unfortunately, those amounts are protected provincially but not federally. It's a tactic for a bankrupt company to use federal protection to overcome those. The other gentleman, Mr. Paillé, said.... I really think we

Finance committee  If we don't take our pension prior to the company closing, we don't get any pension guarantee on any funds we have. We take the full loss as an employee.