I want to thank you all very much for coming today.
This is actually a very important piece of public policy and business that we do here. I have to say that I'm challenged by it in the same way that the chamber is, in that most of the conversation I've had with seniors in my riding is not so much about mandatory retirement as about making sure they have a decent pension at the end of the day that would allow them to retire with some dignity. I understand the argument that is made that if you allow them to work longer, maybe they could build up the credits they need. But this also speaks to the often tongue-in-cheek comment that what we want to create here is cradle-to-the-grave McJobs for everybody. That's certainly not the workplace whose development I'd want to be supporting.
I have to say honestly that I have some concerns as well about how this might impact Canada Pension, for example. It wasn't that long ago that there was a fear that the Liberal government of the day was going to move the retirement age to 67 for old age security, which would be quite detrimental to many hundreds of thousands of seniors who retire and count on that old age security to put them into a category that...well, it doesn't get them out of poverty anymore, but it certainly lifts them a little bit. So it's interesting for me that the chamber has done the kind of work you have done over the last few days to bring forward what I think are amendments that we should consider seriously here.
Have you talked at all, Susanna, with any of the labour groups that might be present in your area concerning some of this? It seems to me, from the conversations I've had with some of them—and we will have the pilots' association before us later this morning—that there are similar issues there. We need to look at the impact of this on retirement plans, how they mesh or don't mesh, and how this interfaces with Canada Pension and what that could mean going forward, and what it would signal to the government that they might consider doing that would impact, then, on the hundreds of thousands of people out there who would love to retire, if they only had a pension plan that would allow them to do so.