Industry committee  The short answer, if there's very little time left, which I guess there is, would be to take a look at what other countries are doing. I think in many areas, Canada represents best practice as far as the protection of pensioners is concerned. There are other models. There are,

Industry committee  No, I don't feel I'm overplaying it, absolutely not. I quoted from a report by the OECD, an OECD working paper on benefit protection in 2007, which did a roundup of the forms of defined benefit pension protection in many countries and concluded that this was a controversial area.

Industry committee  Doing nothing would not be a good move, and that's why I congratulated parliamentarians for all the steps that have already been taken this year: about half a dozen significant reforms that have been passed by Parliament and introduced through regulation. I don't think anybody ca

Industry committee  Let me start on the issue of the poll you mentioned. I can absolutely assure you that none of our members were among the “CEOs" in that poll. That poll is notoriously misrepresented as a CEO poll. It is in fact a voluntary, web-only survey of members of small-town chambers of com

Industry committee  No, I would say that the news reports of those polls are careless. In any event, you asked whether CEOs of large companies care about workers. CEOs of large companies are trying to remain in business and are trying to keep their companies operating. When they operate, they cont

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. As I said before, if we are going to find money to make whole people who belong to defined benefit pension plans that were appropriately managed but invested in the markets that have taken a nosedive so there is a large deficit.... We are not talking

Industry committee  Sorry, I believe they did make contributions.

Industry committee  They did make the contributions, but I'm talking about the accounting scandals at that company.

Industry committee  I think you'd probably agree with me that nothing in this bill will do anything for the Nortel pensioners. Those cases have already worked their way through the courts.

Industry committee  The question is, if you want to, in effect, make people whole—whether it's Nortel or another company—you have to determine where that money is going to come from and who's going to pay for that. The money is not going to be invented out of thin air. If you're going to, in effect,

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. First of all, are we talking about a situation in which the employer did not make the required contributions to the plan, and did not forward the contributions made by the employees? The Nortel case is a tragic one. A lot has been said about it. It wa

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to appear this morning. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the efforts of John Rafferty and other parliamentarians on behalf of private sector workers who are covered by defined benefit pension plans. The issue of pe