Finance committee  Just briefly, I appreciate the problem and the challenge. What's interesting to note is that I'm sure when you were an employer in that instance, you already had one pension available in the CPP. We all know the CPP doesn't pay very much, but what it does pay is secure. That's wh

Finance committee  That is one of our real concerns. We're currently in a period where employers who have workplace pensions, defined benefit plans, are facing difficulty. It's something they share with us, and we end up sometimes at collective bargaining tables, sometimes in other environments, tr

Finance committee  To add to that answer, you connected that question about CPP costs with the way employers try to handle pension costs as part of total compensation. It is worth registering the point that when workplace pension costs go up, in the current arrangement, employers understandably tak

Finance committee  I would say the proposal you're describing, if it is a supplement that is providing for a defined benefit CPP element, would certainly be superior to an uncertain insecure question mark, which is really what people are going to get from the PRPPs. The concern we have with that mo

Finance committee  Okay. I was involved last year in working with the school board workers in the province of Prince Edward Island. I found out that their pension plan, which is supposedly a gold-plated public sector plan, is paying those workers an average annual pension today of under $5,000 per

Finance committee  I'll start with the second question, about the current levels of pensions being provided by the existing workplace arrangements. In fact, CUPE, our union, represents, as you say, a lot of workers in the municipal sector, the hospital sector, school boards, the education sector,

Finance committee  Thank you. This leads directly to my third and final point that I have for today. The government and the advocates for PRPPs have argued that the goal is to establish an arrangement that will extend workplace coverage to workers who don't currently have a pension plan. We are ve

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Kevin Skerrett. I work as a senior research officer on pensions at the national office of CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees. In my role as researcher for the past 15 years, I've provided support to our locals and provincial sections de