Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, witnesses. It's a very good and thoughtful panel.
Let me start with Mr. Béland. I want to talk about the parallelism between CPP and QPP, and whether that parallelism you referenced over time is sustainable over time.
Quebec's demographics are quite a bit different from those of the rest of the country. It's an older population, it has a lower birth rate, and it embraces forms of birth control that the rest of the country doesn't. It has productivity challenges, it has a higher unemployment rate on average, and it is facing some government fiscal challenges because of policy decisions that were made over the last number of years--it supported Quebec Inc., if you will, the caisse. And then the QPP in particular has made some investment decisions that have been difficult to recover from.
So when you talk about the parallelism between CPP and QPP, aren't we really talking about two very different situations, between, if you will, what our friends from the Bloc call “the rest of Canada” and Quebec?