We had handed him a huge pile of documents and called him repeatedly. However, I can say that we received replies from many of you, to whom we had sent a letter. Many of you sent us responses.
That leads me to talk about the same issue raised by people from Nortel: the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, or CCAA. That legislation really has to be changed. It is costing us at least $20 million. Why? Because the banks, credit unions and QPP investment board got their share in the bankruptcy. We were treated as if we had been selling Pepsi. We received $1,000 each. That was the amount received by our mine. That is to say that, to date, each Jeffrey Mine worker has lost at least $100,000. The average age of our pensioner-members is 75 years.
People think that Mr. Bellavance's bill, C-290, which we talked about, will be too expensive. If only the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act had placed employees on the same level as the secured creditors, our losses would have been quite minimal. Yet, we are told that, with such an arrangement, banks would not be able to raise money as easily.
The only thing that companies could do is not to promise pensions if they are not able to pay them. If they do promise them, then there should be a 100% solvency ratio. Since 1991, Jeffrey Mine has never had a solvency ratio of 100% for its pensions, and I can prove that to you anytime.
You must realize that the retirees are the biggest losers in all of this. Just put yourself in the shoes of these retirees for a moment. I have something to say. If the teachers of Quebec lost 35% of their pensions, people would be talking about nothing else. There would be more people who would stand up and defend themselves.
What we want are things that we have really lost. We think we have the right to go after them. Thanks to a great deal of diligent work, we finally managed to get people to listen to us.
Why are we the only creditors who cannot deduct their losses from their taxes? All other creditors of Jeffrey Mine who lost money were able to deduct it from their taxes on their tax return the following year. Why not us?
Remember this: you are the ones who make the laws. You invited us today to try to improve them, and we appreciate that very much. We just want to be able to live decently in Canada.
I can tell you that we are prepared to answer all of your questions. I don't want to take up too much time either. We are 73, 74 years old and we have been working on this for eight years flat out. We have just settled out of court for our class action suit, and we received $7.5 million. The court ruling was handed down on Thursday, so you can see that we have not been twiddling our thumbs.
We are here today to say thank you for listening to us, and if you need us, we are available anytime. We want to see the end of this matter before we are dead and buried.
Thank you very much.