I do have some thoughts. For the members' benefit, I spent 1983 on the research staff of the special Parliamentary committee on pension reform, and that was the committee, among other things, that recommended comprehensive limits for tax assistance for retirement savings.
It was flowing from that, I think, that the Department of Finance increased the RRSP limits to what you see now to bring them in line with the limits on defined benefit pension plans in order to equalize the access to tax assistance for the self-employed or people who didn't have a workplace pension plan.
In one of our discussions, one of the members of that committee said that a fair maximum for tax assistance is about the income of a high school principal. In fact, the access to tax-assisted retirement saving is somewhat higher than that, but in the ball park.
I was really surprised by a witness before the break who said they needed to be able to retain earnings in their private company, not only to capitalize the company but for retirement savings and to pay for their children's education. There are other ways to pay for children's education.
I get love letters because of some of the articles I publish. One person emailed me and said, after a bit of discussion, that he had graduated with $150,000 of student debt. He was a doctor, and he was able to pay it off. It took him three years to pay it off. My God, what kind of income was this person walking into?
Back to the retirement savings, I don't know the details. I was just looking at section 8515 the other day for these individual pension plans. We used to have an issue many years ago when I worked in finance about what we called “top hat” plans, and it seems to have been tightened up considerably, but I assume it's still the case that you can buy retroactive plan enrichments. If you pay yourself a $20,000-a-year salary, which is relatively minimal, in order to set the foundation, and then you come along toward the end of your career and start paying yourself $100,000 or $200,000 a year for the last five years in a final average plan, you could buy back past service based on the multi-$100,000 salary. I think there are things that one might want to look at.