Thank you, Chair. Thank you, witnesses.
I was just thinking of the huge irony of the assembled witnesses here. At one point, the stock valuation of Nortel was higher than Bell; Bell the parent, Nortel the child. In fact, I think you were higher than Royal Bank as well at one point. Nortel is obviously dead and gone. Bell has had its own struggles, but it seems to have survived quite well.
I wonder whether in fact we're just playing around the edges here. We're playing about super priorities, we're playing about bankruptcies, we're playing about surpluses and deficits and things of that nature, and yet a whole whack of these private pension plans are in real trouble. My vague recollection is something in the order of about 60% of the private pension plans kind of flip in and out of trouble.
I just wonder whether you need to be starting to look at a very serious solution of picking up the no-hopers and the faint-hopers and gathering them all together and trying to bring some rationality into the administration and investment decisions of these plans, and whether it's time to think in terms of something like a tarp, where the government just steps in—because one way or another the poor old taxpayer gets stiffed with the failure of these plans. So why not do a pre-emptive strike on some of these ones that are just pretty well never going to recover?
Since the philosophical divide here is between essentially Mr. Perkin and Ms. Eng, I'd be interested in giving Ms. Eng a first shot at that and let Mr. Perkin think about it, and we'll see whether there's some point at which the government should actually be giving some real thought to how to deal with these losers.