Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I want to say that it's great to be back on the finance committee. I see some familiar faces around: Ms. Dzerowicz, Gabriel Ste-Marie, Peter. It's nice to be working with you all again. I'm looking forward to working with all the new faces that we see here today.
I just want to say thank you, Marilyn, for being so strident in bringing this bill forward. I think one thing we can all agree on around this table is that we need to find a way in a country like Canada to protect pensioners. We need to find a way to protect these pensions.
We've talked about this before. I mentioned to you that I come from a law background. I was a corporate commercial lawyer. I did many securitization packages for banks. Banks are really concerned about one thing, which is that they want to make sure they have enough security in place so that if things go wrong, they'll get their money back.
Pensioners have the same grievance. They want to make sure that the benefits of their labour are also secured. It strikes me that we have a bit of a Solomonesque problem here. We need to find a way to protect pensioners but also make sure there is stability in the financial markets so that we don't have adverse macroeconomic consequences to industry across Canada. I don't know what the answer to that is, but I think all of us around this table should be able to find the answer to that question.
I do have some concerns about the idea of simply putting pensions ahead of secure creditors and what impact that might have on the lending community. I'm not so sure that they would just go on with business as usual. I think we need to hear from them about that.
I also worry about the fact that we need to protect the pensioners' pension nest egg. We don't want to kill the golden goose that lays that egg along with the workers and the business. There needs to be a solution that works for both sides of this equation, in my view.
I'm just wondering if you could comment on what I've suggested.