Status of Women committee  I agree with Ms. Smith that what we want is for people to be numerate, first and foremost. I will be going to Washington in 15 minutes, and we are having a conference this week on financial literacy and financial education. I'm something of a skeptic on this, in that the litera

Status of Women committee  I don't have my notes from giving similar testimony yesterday, but I'll try to remember the numbers. I think around one-third of the workforce has an occupational pension plan in Canada, which is a little bit below comparable countries. In the U.K., Ireland, and the United Stat

Status of Women committee  In this area I have to be very careful with my words. I got myself into very big trouble with the pension protection fund in the United Kingdom earlier this year. The first of these insurance-type programs.... We're talking about insurance programs to cover the liabilities of de

Status of Women committee  I'll add to that. Most countries are part of a network of social security agreements that allow for the transfer of pension rights for migrant workers. What is very different is not only the starting point when people migrate into Canada, but how long they're going to stay. Are

Status of Women committee  I agree with you on the targeting issue. I just looked at the international numbers. We have compared the GIS safety net retirement income level with average earnings across OECD countries, and Canada is the seventh-highest of the 30 OECD countries. According to the way that we

Status of Women committee  As a general point, our research at OECD, where we have looked in great detail at fertility rates and the numbers of babies women are having, has clearly shown that it is the countries that most easily enable women to combine a career with having children that have the highest bi

Status of Women committee  One of us should talk. James, do you want to say something?

Status of Women committee  In some of our calculations we do, but not in all of them. We have not directly looked at the question of divorce in terms of having concrete empirical numbers on pension rights after divorce, because divorce law in different countries is very complex. I'm not a lawyer, and I f

Status of Women committee  In our research at the OECD, which was published last year.... Oh, I'm sorry. Ladies first.

Status of Women committee  I was about to mention the big report we had last year from OECD, called “Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries”. I'm not sure of the title in French. In that report we went into much more detail than the standard measures of incomes that are used n

Status of Women committee  The Department of Finance in Canada has set up a retirement research working group chaired by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, Ted Menzies, who is a member of this House. That working group had an experts day meeting on October 27. There is a group of Canad

Status of Women committee  I said more than 30% for Ireland's old age poverty rate.

Status of Women committee  I don't think Canada has as major a debt load as other countries in the OECD. I would point out the U.K, the U.S., Spain, and probably Ireland as well as countries where personal debt loads are much higher than they are in Canada. As to the impact of them on people's savings beha

Status of Women committee  There's nothing I like more than a technical question. The OECD follows an international norm, which is that to calculate the relative incomes of older people and the poverty rate we look at equivalized household disposable income. Equivalized means we take account of differenc

Status of Women committee  Canada is an outlier in two ways, firstly in that the poverty rate is very low. Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and New Zealand are the only countries that have a lower old age poverty rate than Canada. In Canada, I mentioned, the number is about 4%; for the U.S., it's about 25%; fo