Thank you very much. It is indeed 11 p.m., but I'm a night owl anyway, so I'm quite happy to stay up and talk to you.
I think in terms of cost, many countries have been trying for a long time to bear down on the cost of offering private pensions. If you have mandatory private pensions, which is the model followed in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, and it's also very common in central and eastern Europe, in those cases where you have a limited number, a small number, of competing private sector providers--somewhere between 10 and 25 is the norm--there the lowest you can get the cost down to is something like about 0.7% of assets per year.
I mentioned briefly that in Australia and the U.K., which, very much like Canada, had a system of voluntary personal pensions, voluntary individual accounts, the costs were typically around 2%. Australia has moved toward multi-employer schemes, toward industry funds, and they're a much lower cost; they're of the order of 0.5% to 1%. The U.K. has moved, first by regulation, by simply capping their charges at 1% and is now moving to having a much more centralized structure.
Many of the options you offered at the beginning...I think there is a difference between a voluntary contribution to CPP in addition to a compulsory contribution. You're buying a defined benefit rather than having a defined contribution plan, so the CPP is in essence bearing the investment risk for you.
This is something of a distinction there, but I think in terms of getting the charges down, to get to low charges, and I'm talking here of 0.3% to 0.5%, you need a much more centralized system and a centralized clearing house for collecting contributions and some centralized contracting out of asset management.
There are two examples I would suggest you look at there. The clearing house model is the example of Sweden where a cost contribution for the compulsory private pensions are low, they're only 2.5% of earnings. They've got to be very careful to keep costs low. The other example is the Thrift Savings Plan in the U.S., which is a defined contribution scheme for federal employees in the U.S., where the costs are absolutely tying them down at 0.1% to 0.2% of assets.