As I mentioned earlier, we already have a public pension program in Canada and it's known as the CPP and the QPP. That's doing what it was intended to do, which is to provide a basic level of retirement income to Canadians. On top of that, we have the other government support programs like OAS and GIS, topped up in some cases by some of the provinces.
If you're talking about the cost of setting up a supplemental CPP, I honestly don't know. What I can tell you is that there are other third pillar retirement income providers out there today that are providing pension plans on a group basis for less than 1%. It's somewhere between half a percent and three-quarters of a percent. So a lot of the concern we hear in media stories and otherwise about Canadians having to pay 2%, 2.5% is in the retail sector for people with RRSPs who invest through mutual funds. Those aren't people who have pension plans through their employer on a group basis. So what we are encouraging the government to do--both at the federal and the provincial levels--is to take steps so that we can have more group arrangements for people who currently cannot contribute, such as the self-employed.
The self-employed cannot participate in any group pension plan today because they don't have an employer-employee relationship. They are forced to save through RRSPs. So if they have a really good year they are capped on how much they can save; if they have a really bad year, that will limit how much they can save. They can carry forward anything they don't put into it, but it doesn't recognize that, over the lifetime of that self-employed individual, there are ups and downs in terms of the income level.
One of the things we talked about publicly is perhaps a lifetime contribution limit for RRSPs so that there is a little more parity between the person who is forced to save through an RRSP and the person who enjoys the benefits of a pension plan at work. But we'd actually like to see more Canadians in pension plans. For the self-employed, those in small business--even where their employer chooses not to set up a plan because of the cost and complexity--we'd like to see those people in a pension plan. For that to happen we need changes to the tax act. We need changes to the provincial pension standards as well.