Clearly, it would be ideal to increase the maximum surplus that can be accumulated in a pension plan, and even to have, like in the U.S., no limit. I know there are certain pension plans--and I was part of an effort to do that--that have been exempted from the 10% limit. I think it's more like 25% for those plans. But in 25%, the volatility is such--and we could predict that even 20 years ago--that you have good years and you have bad years.
You've stated it clearly: the federal government has limited jurisdiction. But in many jurisdictions, if an employer wants to remove surplus from a pension plan when such a surplus exists, or if they sell a portion of their company, they have to share in the deficit. So if you're an employer, the incentive is certainly not to put more money into a plan than you have to, because essentially when there's a deficit you'll have to put more, but if there's a surplus you won't be able to benefit from it. So the idea of a side fund would be to make it clear that this would be to back the pension fund, but this money could be withdrawn more or less.... Rules could be written that maybe when you have a surplus of 10% or 20%, you could withdraw a piece of it. Or if an employer is in difficulty, maybe they could ask to withdraw part of that money without having to share it with the employees and without having to ask their permission.
The current situation is that a lot of employers in the 1990s.... I'm very familiar with the pension plan. We essentially ran it with zero surplus, because we were doing a lot of transactions. The danger is that if every time you do a transaction and there's a surplus, you have to share it, the incentive for the employer is not to have a surplus. So you need to find ways to make that attractive to the employer.