Thank you very much.
Thank you to the officials for their testimony and contributions in trying to help us understand what's at stake in the bill. Obviously the question is about risk. We're talking about institutions that deal in risk for a living, and we're talking about what is very likely a very small percentage within their own portfolio.
We've heard different numbers mentioned around the table, but the one that is really important to me is the fact that fewer than 30% of Canadian workers right now work in a workplace with a pension. We're already talking about over 70% of the market not applying, because those are Canadians who unfortunately don't have the benefit of a good pension plan in their workplace.
We also know that about 20% of all Canadians who are employed are employed by some level of government, some kind of public sector employment, and typically those are people with defined benefit plans, but they're within the 30% of Canadians who are working with a pension. If 20% of Canadians work in the public sector, I think it's fair to say that those are probably 20% of Canadians who are working with a defined benefit plan.
Now we're talking about 10% of Canadian workers who are working in a workplace that isn't a public sector workplace but does have a pension plan. That doesn't mean they're working in a workplace with a defined benefit pension plan. They could have a defined contribution plan. In fact, in the private sector, there are more employers who have defined contribution plans than have defined benefit plans. Let's call it, I don't know, 40%, which would be quite generous to say. Of the people working in the private sector in Canada who have a pension plan, 40% have a defined benefit pension plan. We're talking about 4% of workers. What percentage of business overall is that? I don't know, but certainly not all the banks.... No one bank is invested in all of that business, so it's 4% of an investment portfolio.
Incidentally, not all of those companies are going to fail. Of that 4% of Canadian workers who work at a company in the private sector that maybe has a defined benefit plan.... I think that number is probably lower. How many of those Canadians are going to be at a company that fails? Well, it's going to be a far lower number.
I think we're getting well into the territory of margin of error, as far as I'm concerned, for large financial institutions. They fund businesses for a living, and they have experience picking winners. I don't think Canada's financial institutions go out and give loans to people who they think are going to fail. By and large, businesses do succeed. We're talking about a very small portion of private sector workplaces with defined benefit plans whose businesses fail.
Then let's take a look at some of the cases where we've seen extraordinary failure. Department officials mentioned Air Canada in 2004. Well, guess who was there to backstop Air Canada in 2004. It's no great secret. Usually, when Air Canada screws up, there's a lot of public money that goes into backing Air Canada. Let's not kid ourselves around this table. We all know it to be true.
Who gets taken care of in that? Well, it's also true that the financial institutions get taken care of, because the government steps in to have their back. What is another case when Canada's major financial institutions were exposed to incredible risk? In 2008, when we had a global recession, did they get hung out to dry? No. Who stepped in to have their back? Again, the federal government stepped in to have their back to make sure they were doing okay.
In 2020, when the world economy shut down, did the banks shut down? Did they lose their shirt? No. The federal government stepped in with taxpayer money to make sure that the big banks and insurance companies were doing just fine, thank you very much. In fact, they made record profit. That's why we've had to call for an extraordinary pandemic dividend in order to get some of that public money back, because not only were they not losing their shirt, but they were making record profits.
I find it really hard to hear some kind of violin song play around this table for Canada's largest financial institutions. Somehow we're talking about risk that's going to bring them down because we want to do something for the person who worked at Sears for 30 years and paid into a pension plan. It wasn't a gimme or a Christmas present. It was something they went to work for, and when that gets cut, that's their rent, their groceries and their ability to have a nice outing with their partner in their golden years that gets taken away.
I'm not trying to minimize the importance of conversations about risk, but we're talking about people who do risk professionally for a living and get a lot of help from around these tables when things go wrong for them.
This is one time that we can do something for people who never get that help. They certainly don't get it often enough.
Unless we get some really compelling, real numbers—whether they come from department officials who are concerned about the potential unintended consequences, or whether they come from the financial institutions—we should absolutely be moving forward with this bill and ensuring that Canadian workers finally get something like the protection that financial institutions bank on every day of the year.
I don't have any questions. I think I have heard enough, frankly. What I want to do is move forward. If I'm going to hear from anyone, it's going to be people who have real-life experience of being on the wrong end of the current bankruptcy laws, because those are the people to whom we owe our time and service around this table.
Thank you very much.