Good afternoon, Mr. Chair.
My name is Gaston Fréchette, of the Jeffrey Mine, in Asbestos. With me is René Langlois who is the Secretary of our committee.
First of all, I would like to begin by thanking you all for having invited us here. If you are taking the time to invite all these people to look at what might be done, that proves that there are problems with our pension plan system.
I would like to talk about the 1,300 asbestos miners who spent their working lives mining asbestos. On the morning of October 25, 2002, the mine's CEO told us that it was all over; no more big pensions. We could forget about our insurance. That was a thing of the past. We learned that our pensions would be cut by at least 20% or 25%, and were later told that our pensions would be cut by 35% to 40%. That represented an annual shortfall of $5.5 million for the city and region of Asbestos.
Those who have been to Asbestos know that it always used to be a rather small city. Today, it's a village. The Jeffrey Mine was the only real employer. I already said that there were some 1,300 employees. They worked on three shifts. That did not leave any time for their spouses to work outside the home. That means that 95% of Asbestos households had a single earner. In most cases, it was the father and husband. As a result, those pension cuts affected two people. The spouses who stayed at home were not entitled to QPP benefits. They could only depend on old age security. If you added all that up, it made for very substantial losses.
Once we realized that, we took matters into our own hands: we became mobilized and formed a committee. We did everything that was possible and, in 2003, we ended up meeting with the Premier of Quebec. We received $4.5 million, a substantial amount that helped us cover 11 months of lost income. At the time, we also met with Christian Paradis, who was a minister and a neighbour of ours. He is very knowledgeable about asbestos, and neither does he fear its use. We also met with your former minister, Maxime Bernier, the MP for Beauce. I do not want to make a bad joke, but I wonder whether he did not forget our documents somewhere, because we never heard from him again.