I wouldn't say it's very well known. Pension accounting—and I'm delighted to be talking to your committee about this—isn't a topic that has been a big grabber in the past because valuing these payments that will occur a long time in the future is a genuine difficulty. It's why there's debate about it.
The place that I would refer you to for a similar type of analysis would be in the United States. There are some think tanks there, some academics, who have been paying attention to this problem at the subnational level, particularly in the United States. I mentioned them already, so I won't go on at length, but I will say that the problems there are worse than what you find in Canada because the discount rates are so high and many of the plans are extremely brittle. That's why you see these problems.
The debate that we're part of here is about valuing the liabilities. The people who have looked at the U.S. plans and said there's a problem and they're understating their liabilities, make the same case that we do. If you think about the value of this promise, including the one that we are making to our members of Parliament as they work, it's unconditional. There's no flexibility in that benefit should the funded status of the plan turn out to be less than was anticipated. In that respect they're unlike, say, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan or some of the shared-risk plans.
We also have this tendency to discount at assumed rates of interest. They're not as high in Canada as they are in some of these U.S. plans, but there's a real question as to why you would just pick a number like that when you have an obligation that is so clearly comparable to the promise that you're making in the federal government's other bonds.