Thank you very much.
Our acronym is the legal name for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, but we now use the name CARP because we act for people who are retired as well as those who would like to retire—and in this climate that's going to be a major challenge.
We're a national non-profit, non-partisan organization with 330,000 members across the country and 23 chapters. We advocate for the quality of life of Canadians as they age, and retirement security is one of our three main advocacy pillars. We're here to give you our perspective on retirement security as we see it.
There are huge challenges, which everybody is aware of. The demographic challenge is the first. The population is aging. The population of those aged 65 and plus numbered 4.3 million in the 2006 census, or 13.7% of the Canadian population. By 2026, it's expected to nearly double to 22% of the Canadian population. Those are the people who are 65 plus. However, people who are 45 plus and 55 plus are also thinking about retirement. Some already have. Those who are 55 plus numbered eight million in the 2006 census, or 25% of the population. Those who are 45 plus are the ones we particularly speak for, and they numbered some 13 million in 2006, or 41% of the population. That's nearly half of the population. I might point out that this part of the population is the most active part and has the most regular voters.
People are living longer and healthier lives. The most important premise for them is that they not outlive their money. The issue of retirement security has always been a challenge, but particularly in this market.
If we look at the context they're facing, most people know there is OAS and GIS to ensure they have at least $14,000 per annum. But as everybody knows, you cannot live on that. The Canada Pension Plan and the Quebec Pension Plan have a maximum payout of about $10,000.
Private pension assets consist of employer pension plans and RRSPs. That's all we have, but there's a lot of money in Canada in those. In private pension assets, there is $1 trillion in EPP or employer-sponsored pension plans and some $600 billion in RRSPs and other private savings.
That sounds like a lot of money, but the difficulty is that it's not distributed evenly. What we find is that there's a concentration, with 31% of families with $100,000 or more in retirement assets holding 90% of all retirement assets. In the public sector, as Mr. Lamoureux has mentioned, 85% of public sector workers have access to private pension plans, but only 26% in the private sector have any kind of access to a pension plan.
Where does this leave us? Of those without any pension savings at all, whether in the form of an employer-sponsored pension plan or retirement savings or socks under the bed, there are some 3.9 million Canadian families who have no pension assets whatsoever. That's about 29% of the Canadian population. Unattached individuals fair even worse, with 45% of them not having any pension savings or retirement savings. In the 65 plus category, including singles, 27.5% had no retirement savings whatsoever as of 2005, when this survey was last done. The 45 plus and 55 plus age groups fair slightly better, as 23% of them have no pension savings of any kind to get them through their retirement years.
So what are we talking about when we talk about a pension system? The World Bank has defined some core principles that any country seeking to have a pension system should have. One is that the pension system should be adequate, that is, it should provide benefits for the fullest breadth of the population, sufficient to prevent what the bank calls old age poverty and sufficient to be a reliable means of smooth lifetime consumption. Moreover, the pension system has to be affordable for both employers and employees. And it has to be sustainable over the longer term. Importantly, it must also be robust; that is, it has to be able to withstand economic, demographic, and political volatility. In economic terms, we've just had a crushing blow; and demographically, I've described the aging population; and politically, we've had volatility. I'll leave that to this committee.
The robustness of our pension system has been shown to be deficient. In the current climate, you will see headlines that you've never seen before, including the fact that even the gold-plated pension plans, the indexed defined benefit plans, are at risk. Whoever has heard of that?
The only pension fund that is not at risk is the CPP, and it has performed better than all the others we've seen. So the question then becomes, during this economic crisis, which has affected even the retirement security of those with pension funds, what should be done and what should be done immediately?
Well, we have some recommendations. Our first recommendation is in relation to the existing pension funds and the need to rebalance the interests of the employers and the employees—not to put too fine a point on it—because the changes that have been made to the regulations have destabilized some of the pension funds and made them less solvent. That's why we're facing some of the crisis we're seeing now. It's not just the market downturn; it's the fact that all of the rules that were put in place have not been observed.
The second point is that there should be a universal pension plan for all of those who do not have any access to pension savings.
Finally, we should immediately call a pension summit, at which people who represent retirees and plan members have a material seat at the table.
That is for the future. But for the immediate needs of retirees who are facing this crisis, we are recommending increases to OAS and the GIS, and that RRIF withdrawal requirements be removed and that people have access to their own money in locked-in funds.
Thank you very much.