Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
To each and every one of you, I really appreciate your coming here today. I also appreciate your understanding of how Parliament works sometimes and why we had to delay your testifying.
I was reading your Macdonald-Laurier testimony here, and I have to say that I disagree on a certain level. My grandmother makes $18,000 a year in retirement. She's 88 years old and she's pretty well at the poverty line, if not below. I think there's something to be said for people who have worked their entire lives. I know my grandmother has worked, maybe not at jobs that paid a lot, but she certainly did work. I think as a government we have to sometimes look to the long-term future to find ways of making pensions sustainable. For instance, in Canada only 38.4% of pensions today, or at least in 2004, were actually registered pension plans in private hands.
I was also reading the Hansard from back when we put the CPP in place, and many of the same arguments—for instance, by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and many of your comments—were the exact same comments they were making back then: that it's not something we need. Yet we know that 44% of seniors lived in poverty, according to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
I have a general question for all of you.