Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here with you and to share in the very valuable work that you do for this country. It's important to see all of the dedicated people around this table who are committing their lives to making Canada a better place.
It's also exciting to see the fellow panellists here, who have a very wide-ranging and diverse group of interests in the country. I thank you for allowing me to be here.
I'm here with Fair Pensions for All. We're an organization dedicated to looking at reform in the Canadian pension system. There are various aspects we need to look at in order to bring the system back into balance and to make the system fairer for all Canadians. I'd like to address some of those issues for you today, to go through some of the facts and figures that represent the imbalances that exist in the pension system today, and to outline some of the unfairness in the system that we feel is important to address and bring back to a level of fairness for all Canadians.
I'd like to congratulate the government for the recent moves it's taken, the bold and courageous steps toward making reforms in the pension system: the reform of MP pensions, and also the reform of public sector pensions. It is a start toward the journey that we need to begin in order to make these pensions, as I say, more fair for all Canadians.
It's a good start, but I'd like to point out to you today some of the areas in which we need to take further steps to address some of the unfairness that exists.
From our point of view, we see unfairness at basically two different levels. We see one level of unfairness between the public sector and the private sector, the huge gap that we point out, the inequality between the seniors who are retiring today, those who have access to public sector pensions, those who have access to private pensions, and those who have no access to pensions at all.
There is also intergenerational unfairness. We have a group of baby boomers, myself included, who have made very large promises to themselves in terms of the entitlements they are going to be giving themselves. Unfortunately, with the current economic situation in Canada and around the world, those promises are starting to come into question. The question is whether or not they are sustainable over the long term.
As we try to shore up and maintain those promises, we see a generation behind us that is forced to fund them. That generation is making very large contributions to their pension plans mainly to fund the shortfall that exists in those pension plans. They are putting, in some situations, up to 15% of their wages as contributions into these pension plans, and a lot of that's going into the shortfalls that exist.
A large part of the imbalance that's occurred has occurred over the past two decades. One of the things I'd like to point out in our report is the level of contributions that are going into the plan. You can see back in 2001, $28 billion went into RRSPs and $11.6 billion went into the pensions of public sector employees.
We move that ahead to 2011 and look at the contributions that occurred last year, where 80% of the population outside of the public sector contributed $33.8 billion into their RRSPs and another $22 billion into private sector pension plans, but the public sector pension plans accumulated $31.3 billion. That's a substantial increase from $11.6 billion a decade ago to $31 billion today. We're told that there are still very large public sector pension shortfalls that need to be funded.
Those are the issues I would like you to look at today in terms of determining the next steps as you continue your reforms of the public pension system. We'd like to be able to assist you with some guidance.
Thank you.