Thank you very much.
We appreciate the chance to speak to everyone here. In a way we've been hiding in the back because our benefits were still being paid up until now, and we appreciate that. You don't know how much we appreciate it.
As people on LTD, we have no options. We basically ended our working careers when we qualified for LTD. Now that things are getting to this stage, probably only a small percentage of the people on LTD recognize that their benefits might be at risk. We know very well how much they are at risk from doing a lot of research on the subject.
We wonder why Nortel could get tax benefits by storing the money to provide our benefits in a health and welfare trust but did not insure this LTD benefit, as specifically recommended by the Canada Revenue Agency's bulletin on the subject. We also wonder why our government has no way of enforcing that requirement and tells us that we need to come to the finance committee to ask them why it was not protected and what the finance committee can do about it.
Right now, we're still being paid. We appreciate that. We also appreciate that it could end at any time, and we have a lot of years before we can get to our pensions, if there are enough pensions left, thanks to all the efforts of the pensioner group. During the time we're waiting, which could be up to 24 years for some of the people that we know in our group, we will no longer get our wage replacement. It was 70% of our original salary for most people. That salary could be from a long way back; in my case, it is in 1994 dollars, so that was a pretty small salary to start with. From that, if we get 20ยข on the dollar, I'll be making about 20% of the salary that I was getting from the LTD pay.
We will lose our health benefits. Many of us, in addition to making great use of the health benefits provided by Nortel, also have significant out-of-pocket health costs, so this is another factor that really worries us. We can't qualify for EI because we weren't paying into it, nor can we qualify for the wage earner protection program.
We will be left with the CPP disability. That will be about 20% of what we were making on our LTD. CPP disability was designed to provide 25% of the basic minimum that people need to live on.
As Nortel employees we deserve better than that. Instead, some people on LTD will end up possibly on welfare. We will end up dependent on the government--not in a proactive way, in that they protected our benefits, but retroactively, by applying for welfare. Some people in our group will end up in the Royal Ottawa Hospital, and one already has--that's really hard for us to see--because of all the stress this is causing us.
Thank you.