Actually there's a disincentive today for employers to maintain or even create new defined benefit pensions. The disincentive is around the treatment of surplus funds in a pension fund.
We believe the answer is to legislate that there must be solvency at all times. That's law in the Netherlands, and it's been successful. It would take several years to work into it, but I believe there's a way employers can be given incentives to do so by allowing them to use surplus funds in an appropriate way.
There are disincentives today. For example, surplus funds in the pension fund are separate and protected; it doesn't matter how much money is in the pension fund, it can't be touched.
In fact, if the surplus is greater than 10%, a company cannot put any more money into the plan, even if it wanted to. Even if a company felt that five years down the line it looked as if there was going to be a deficit because of decreasing interest rates, it can't do anything.
So there are a lot of reasons the employers or sponsors don't want to be in defined benefit pension plans anymore. They're putting money in there and they can't touch it.
We would propose something similar to what the Province of Quebec is legislating currently, and that is the creation of a reserve fund that would be available when times are bad and yet, in the short term, can be used as an asset of the company.