Thank you very much for that question.
We recognize that the perspective Canadians need to have in order to make confident decisions for their families is a sense of security in the long term. We know that confidence among individuals and among businesses is critically important. For individuals, it means confidence that they are going to be able to retire in future; for businesses, it is confidence that their employees are going to be able to continue working for them and won't seek other employment because they are concerned about their long-term futures.
Putting in place a pension plan, an enhancement to the Canada Pension Plan that can make a real difference for individuals over the long term, was our goal, and doing that, we recognize, is very much a long-term goal. We're doing something today that we can be proud of because we're really focusing on how we can help the next generation and the generations after that. We're making a long-term decision that goes past any electoral cycle, and we're doing it in a way that helps those people who are coming after us in much the same way that people in the 1960s put the Canada Pension Plan into place and improved the old age security and the guaranteed income supplement and did something that over the long term would significantly change poverty among the elderly. That is the perspective.
On your question regarding how to put that into place, we worked with the provinces. We spoke to the provinces about their individual financial situations. We worked to make sure we could put this into place in a way that would not in any way jeopardize businesses across the country, because we want to ensure there is confidence among business owners, large and small, and because we recognize provincial and national economic challenges. By starting in 2019 and by doing this over a seven-year period, we know people will be able to enhance their contribution gradually and in a way that's entirely manageable, which will allow them to have significantly more savings than when they started and to face a retirement that will be much more secure.