Thank you very much, Chair.
And thank you to both of you for very excellent presentations. I'm a bit sorry that I have only seven minutes to continue this conversation.
I want to start with a general observation. We have 1.4 million unemployed Canadians right now, and in my home town of Hamilton the youth unemployment rate is twice the national average. So when we talk about the need to retain older workers, I think there are significant regional discrepancies in labour force development, particularly with respect to skills shortages. I think both of you have talked about that in different ways.
Mr. Chaykowski, you just finished by talking about the government needing to be very careful about not creating disincentives for participation in the labour force, yet I think about my sister-in-law, who is a teacher and eligible to retire in January. She wanted to continue teaching until June to finish out the school year, but the school board is actually buying her out because it's cheaper for them to bring in younger teachers. And again, there are a significant number of young Canadians looking for work—which again is perhaps a regional issue.
On retention, I want to talk specifically to you, Mr. Béjaoui, about it because I think you talked about pensions as being both a carrot and stick for retention.
In some workplaces, if you have a defined benefit plan you may well decide that you want to continue to work, because you want to maximize your pension benefits at the end of your working life. On the other hand, if as a government policy you raise the age of OAS eligibility to 67, for example, it's no longer a choice for many people whether they want to continue working; they have to. So in that case pension policy is a stick rather than a carrot.
I wonder if you could comment about pensions in particular with respect to retention.