Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the witnesses for appearing. It's been very interesting. I knew we'd get another version of the facts.
It's difficult. Everybody in this room is here for the right reason, and I think we all sympathize with the former employees. It's funny how we got here. We're here actually for another reason. We're conducting a study on the stability of our financial system and credit availability, and then we noticed there were problems with pensions, so we've been conducting a study. As It turns out, there's no better case study than the present case study, because it's actually a live one.
Now we're caught in a dilemma, because as parliamentarians we have committees and we have our own responsibilities within those committees--forget about our jurisdictional responsibilities, whether it be federal politicians, provincial, or municipal politicians. You're lucky I can toss the ball over, because we have the parliamentary secretary for industry, but I'm not sure how we're going to be able to solve this.
There are two points here. There's the same question I asked Mr. Zafirovski initially; that is, how do we prevent this from happening again, and what do we do now? What is happening now I'd hate to say is a commercial dispute, but there is definitely disagreement on the facts. How do we get to an agreement if we can't even agree on what happened in the past? So this is a big problem.
Everybody pretty well has suggested that we need to change the CCAA. I don't know how that's going to happen in the next little while and help the people we're trying to help. So I need some direction. I have to understand a little bit of what's happened in the past.
For example, Mr. Sproule, you talk about the bondholders being sophisticated, but I beg to differ. The bondholders are not sophisticated or else they wouldn't have invested. I think they're the least sophisticated of all, and that's what we've been able to see during all our studies. I'm going to turn around and maybe put the blame on you, because you were actually there. You're the employees; you see what's going on. Why didn't you help us and say maybe this is not a company we should be investing in? It might be a hard question, and you might laugh at it, but you are the front people. What happened there?