Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Généreux, I want to make a point here: the reason I raised the $50,000 in the beginning was not to malign or humiliate anybody, but to try to talk about the lens through which people are looking at this problem. Those who earn in the area above $50,000 a year have a different perspective from those below that figure.
I agree with everyone at this table that this is not something we can get a quick solution for. We as a party have offered some suggestions and ideas. One of the things we talked about was somehow addressing the quarter of a million people who are below the poverty line in an immediate way.
On preferred status, Ms. Puffer, I should correct one thing I said. When I talked about the Australian survey, I should have mentioned that it was brought to our attention by Melanie Johannink, who was here on Tuesday. It was a 2005 study, so when I said it was released on Tuesday, I gave the wrong impression and should correct that.
We're talking about a situation that when Nortel shut its doors it had $2.4 billion or thereabouts in cash assets, and $4 billion in solid assets. It refused to pay severance. As my friend across the way mentioned, there are 400 people who are walking away with nothing. I had two people in my office in Hamilton who are long-term retirees and who are facing a loss of benefits and everything. So that does bring a certain passion to what we're all trying to do here.
It should be a two-stage process, in my view. We must do some things immediately. I think one of them is to protect the quarter of a million people and the other is to give preferred creditor status for pension plans. We also need a national summit to bring together the people and ideas that we're all hearing, and to do it with due diligence to ensure that we do the best thing we possibly can do.
For small businesses, I believe we need a mandatory CPP increase, though people may take issue with this, for a small-business person to put something into, instead of putting their money into an RRSP where they have administrative and other fees going forward. As my friend indicated, there are some people in small businesses who live a very fine line financially, particularly in the early years. If things do improve, they would still have the opportunity to further invest later in life.
We have a generation, as Ms. Di Vito said, that's parking debt into the future. It's a generation that's not looking at planning in a way that my parents did or we have been able to do. As a result of that, I again bring us back to perhaps considering a mandatory CPP. If you think in terms of growing the assets exclusively within the CPP, where it's mandatory, rather than having a supplementary plan on the outside with its new administration and new costs, whether or not we get to the full doubling, I think it's something we have to give very serious consideration to.
I've made more notes here than I probably should have done.
Ms. Cameron, if you look at the situation at Nortel, though it's been indicated before that you had no role to play, the only possible federal role would have been an amendment to the CCAA or the BIA to help to protect those workers with those kinds of assets, the $2.4 billion in cash and the $4 billion in solid assets. That would have been the only way, that I can see.