Yes, thank you very much, Chair. I'll speak very briefly as an individual and as a pensioner.
I joined Bell Northern Research, which subsequently became part of Nortel, back in 1973, and I went on pension 29 years later. I want to say that one of the problems you're facing is that among the 20,000 or so people who are already affected or who are going to be affected by the underfunding of the pension plan, many older people are completely unaware of the risk they are at.
I've been spoken to by many people who are on survivor pensions and who have continued to assume that their pensions were protected by government. These issues of the underfunding of the pension plan, the impact of the failure of the stock market, and the impending cancellation of many of these supplementary benefits, such as the health plan, life insurance.... The health plan, of course, includes dental benefits, includes the drug plan and so on, which is absolutely crucial for these older retirees. Many of them are going to be in a case of extreme hardship.
In this room today I recognize many former colleagues and contacts from Nortel. I think you've heard repeatedly and through many other contacts that Nortel was very much a teamwork kind of company that made a huge contribution to Canada's technology economy. It functioned like a university. It was perhaps more important than the National Research Council in terms of creating knowledge and intellectual property that allowed the formation of many companies and many world-leading technologies. It was a jewel that is at risk of loss. Therefore, I, like many other former Nortel employees, hope that initiatives may be possible like the Robert Ferchat proposal that part of the company might be resurrected to create a much smaller but still a technology jewel as part of Canada's technology economy.
I will say that you have many people who could not come into this room today. There were people who were turned away and are standing on the front steps outside Parliament this morning. Back in January, when Nortel first filed for CCAA protection, we had over 700 people show up trying to get into the first information meeting organized entirely by volunteers, because many of us, as pensioners, as retirees, have just not had the kind of information from the company or from the monitor to really make it clear what's happening in this process. So we're here before you today, and you've heard some eloquent proposals from the Nortel retiree protection committee. I have volunteered also to help that committee. I just wanted to speak today as a pensioner, like many of the people sitting behind me for whom this is a crucial issue.
Federal government intervention is essential, because although this is a multi-jurisdictional problem, as you've heard, many of the problems have been created because the federal process overrides provincial protections we were relying on.
Thank you.