Status of Women committee  I actually work in the area of pension division on marriage breakdown. The way it is in Canada is that all provinces permit the division of pension benefits on marriage breakdown; Manitoba requires it. Usually there's a limit, such that only 50% of the pension benefits can be tra

Status of Women committee  The tax-free savings accounts you are referring to are not taken into account for purposes of the pension division rules. They would, under provincial property law, be taken into account for purposes of determining the family assets subject to division. What's interesting about

Status of Women committee  Sure. I think your question raises a couple of issues. First of all, if you're an immigrant, you have to be in Canada for a certain period of time to qualify for old age security benefits. Those are the government income support benefits. On the other part of the question, it

Status of Women committee  I would add briefly that on divorce, most provincial jurisdictions provide upon marriage breakdowns for a roughly equivalent division of pension benefits earned during the marriage. How much each party actually gets varies according to the jurisdiction, but pension benefits are s

Status of Women committee  I have not looked at the personal debt load or how it impacts saving.

Status of Women committee  The solutions that we think respond to your question would be to get more people into pension plans. Generally, the Canadian public is very badly served by the RRSP pension system: most people can't use it; they pay very high fees; when they get into later career after they've go

Status of Women committee  I think there's no question that, to increase the number of years you could use for an earnings, dropout would help, because it would increase the CPP benefits that women get in retirement. Is this the best way of doing it? I think it depends to some degree what kind of family

Status of Women committee  If I understand the question correctly—

Status of Women committee  It's one approach. One of my concerns with it would be that the Canada Pension Plan in many ways isn't really a pension plan. It's a kind of hybrid vehicle that provides disability insurance and pension income insurance and that started out as a pay-as-you-go system and then was

Status of Women committee  Thank you. As a point of order, do we have 10 minutes in total or 20 minutes?

Status of Women committee  That's what we thought.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. What we wanted to talk to you about today is the current state of the retirement savings system in Canada and where it's expected to go, according to three themes: coverage, meaning who has access to a pension plan; adequacy, meaning how many people are likely to have