Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank all of the witnesses for being with us this afternoon.
Perhaps I could begin with Mr. Lockwood and Mr. Wacheski. I'll basically tell you how I see the state of affairs and then ask you one question.
Certainly we are highly aware of this issue. As you probably know, Mr. Lockwood, we have a bill in the Senate, through Senator Art Eggleton, that would effectively fix the situation for those on long-term disability. We support it strongly. The idea would be to initially improve, in the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, the position of people who are on long-term disability—which is what they have asked for. We think this would be sufficient.
In the medium term, I think we'd also want to change the law further so that in the future companies would be obliged to either fund or insure their long-term disability plans, so that problems like Nortel is facing now would not happen again. We've studied this closely and I'm aware of the seriousness of this situation.
We don't have our own bill for pensioners, but the NDP does, and we'd be committed to that.
We have asked the government in question period if they will support our own Senate bill, because I know that time is of the essence, but so far they have shown no inclination to support it. That is where the matter stands now, as far as I can figure it out.
I'd like to ask each of you just one question. Have you or any of your representatives, to your knowledge, representing either the long-term disabled or the pensioners, spoken to anyone in the government on this subject, and what answer did you or your representatives receive?