Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'll do my best to stay on top of what seems like a complex journey here.
I am going to ask some basic questions, the answers to which I think Canadians and workers would be interested to hear.
When you talk about the nature of a defined pension plan, the first thing is the unconditional obligation or contract with the employer and employee. As I think we can all appreciate, for those who are in those plans, those kinds of pensions are valued very highly. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether they're good or bad.
In what you've brought forward, and in the fact that we're not using a rate that gives us a realistic projection into the future and we're therefore not basing it on what contributions need to be made for people right now, is there a way to have a defined pension plan that is more realistic in its rate of return or are you saying that defined pension plans are something we're not going to have in the future? Are they something that only happen in government because governments don't go bankrupt?
I'm just trying to figure out where that fits into your thoughts.