Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have a lot of sympathy for people facing the situation described by Ms. Smith, of United Senior Citizens of Ontario. I think that you are giving us a very accurate portrait of what retirees are going through—retirees who have neither power nor a voice in the face of the economic turbulence we are experiencing in this country.
I would like to come back to the main reason for the drop in revenues affecting various pension funds—namely, poor investments and poor decisions on the part of individuals who are supposedly investment experts. I would also like to come back to the matter of performance bonuses, because it is absolutely scandalous. People are receiving bonuses of many hundreds of thousands of dollars in addition to their salary. The amounts can be as high as one million dollars, regardless of the consequences of these individuals' decisions for overall performance.
I would also like to know what Mr. Valentini thinks of this practice. He said earlier that the board of directors is the one who sets these policies. However, I would like to hear his own views. He holds a senior management position and is responsible for an investment board. I would like to know whether he approves of the idea that performance bonuses should be paid to staff solely on the basis of short-term performance, something that can have very significant prejudicial effects on the pension fund over the long term.