Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Mr. Clerk.
I'm Marie Smith, president of the United Senior Citizens of Ontario. It is a pleasure to be here today to bring our problems to you.
There is great anxiety among the 300,000 seniors who are members of the United Senior Citizens of Ontario about the financial crisis. Companies are filing for bankruptcy protection and going bankrupt while their pension funds have large deficits. Seniors are worried their pensions will be cut. Personal retirement savings have been hit. Seniors are afraid to spend money because they need to preserve their capital.
The professional investment managers of Canada's pension funds have let seniors down. Pension funds bought high-risk investment products, allowing financial companies to amass these toxic products on their balance sheets. The bank executives, and the pension fund managers themselves, were paid millions of dollars in compensation based on false profits from high-risk products. Now the pensioners have to pay for their greed and possible fraud. The pension fund managers let this happen without uttering a word to us.
The United Senior Citizens of Ontario and our affiliate, the National Pensioners and Senior Citizens Federation--one million senior members--have been working with Diane Urquhart since 2006 on financial abuses affecting seniors. Pensioners and senior citizens are suffering billions of dollars in losses in their retirement accounts due to unsuitable and fraudulent investment products. These are being sold to them on the basis of misleading marketing information. We conclude that our members' interests are not being protected by current self-regulatory organizations and provincial securities commissions governing securities and accounting standards.
Representatives of the United Senior Citizens of Ontario, better known as the USCO, and the National Pensioners and Senior Citizens Federation met with federal public safety ministry officials and the opposition public safety critics in Ottawa on March 30. We have told these public safety officials that the first priority for structural change in the field of securities is to rebuild how the securities crime policing is done in this country. The USCO supports the proposed new Canadian securities crime unit developed by the respected and recently retired detective sergeant of the Toronto Police Services fraud squad, Gary Logan. We need to listen to Gary Logan because he is a success story in securities crime policing. Mr. Logan put two of Canada's notorious rogue brokers in jail—Michael Holoday and Nelson Allen.
I would also like to bring to your attention that seniors are having difficulty surviving on the old age security and the CPP pension plans. These seniors on low incomes would welcome an increase so they can have both heat and food in their homes.
Seniors would also like to thank the government for income splitting. What can you do for individuals who still have the same expenses but now find themselves living alone when everything costs the same in their home?
I'll be interested in your questions.
Thank you very much.