First of all, I owe you a note of thanks. I think you were part of the team that decided we should be talking about this today, and I want to say on this very first day back in the House this fall that I couldn't be happier than to be talking about how we are expanding the Canada Pension Plan for Canadians.
We made a promise to Canadians that we would work to enhance the Canada Pension Plan. We made a promise to Canadians that we would work in collaboration with the provinces to come to a solution that could make a real and measurable difference in their lives over the long term so that we could help them to retire in dignity, and we were very pleased to be able to work together with the provinces to get to an answer that, over the long term, could really do something that we know needs to be done.
I'll take you back to some of the key issues and challenges here. A significant number of Canadians, 1.1 million Canadian families, are not saving enough right now to have the same level of income or the same standard of living when they retire as they have today. This is just a challenge that we face as a nation. We know the system we put in place over the last two generations, in which workplace pensions would help many Canadians, is no longer functioning in the way that it has historically. More and more organizations are winding up defined benefit plans and fewer and fewer Canadians are actually in those programs, so there is a real challenge facing Canadian families. We know that the way to solve this is to figure out how we can enhance the Canada Pension Plan, the most effective savings vehicle that Canadians can have, in a way that would not only help the economy over the long term but also ensure that people have a way to save that puts them in a much stronger position.
The agreement we have come to will actually be an improvement for one-quarter of those Canadians who are facing that challenging situation, and it will do so in a way that will enable the economy to grow and enable us to create jobs along the way. We believe it is absolutely one of the key cornerstones of what we have done so far in our work for Canadians, and we are very proud to be moving forward this fall in putting it into legislation.