Finance committee  It's just another attempt to take the risk that the employer has agreed to take on, willingly and freely, and shift it to the pensioners. It would make the math easier, but the elephant in the room on the math is that these same claims that have been made today were made in 200

Finance committee  Again, I don't know, but if you use the term “wind up”.... To wind up a pension if you're an ongoing business, you have to fully fund it before you wind it up, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The other thing is that when you talk about the 1.4 million or whatever it is, t

Finance committee  I don't know.

Finance committee  This is one of the great misunderstandings of federally regulated pensions. When they say they have five years to pay back the deficit, everybody leaps to the conclusion that, five years after that deficit, the pension is fully funded. That's not what happens. They have five year

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'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  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 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  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  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  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

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

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.