I'm going to be focusing my questions primarily on Ms. MacEwen, but we've had some agreement here that surprised me a little. Ms. Pohlmann, when you talked about how the 2015 deadline for taking care of the deficit should be crowded out to 2017, you publicly agreed with the NDP.
Mr. Thomas, you talked about the need for pensions among your group. I agree with you. Twelve million Canadians don't have pensions. I just want to point out my perspective. That may or may not be accurate in Ms. Pohlmann's case, and I can see my friend here is going to proceed a little further on that.
Going to Ms. MacEwen, the reason I raised the pension issue is we have a national pension plan now that the CLC has been promoting an increase to. That to my mind is a way of addressing the problem with less of a complication than the PRPPs. Ms. Pohlmann's right in that there are concerns about whether or not the industry or the provinces will go forward on the PRPPs. At least one province says they don't want to; I think it was Ontario. That may change with the change of leadership. The issue of pensions is obviously very present on everybody's mind.
Having raised that particular point with regard to the increase of CPP, it is a well-known stated position of the CLC and the NDP as well, so I don't think we have go into that and I'll shift gears. It's just that when I heard what sounded like some agreement, I wanted to raise that. I've heard rumours that some folks in the CLC were concerned about the provisions of EI funding that you see in this bill.
I have a connection going back and I should label it. The CLC has 3.3 million members. It was established in 1883. For 14 years I was a president of the labour council in Hamilton.
My point is that the CLC has had a long history of advocating for workers, and in this case we have concerns about EI that I'd like you to address.