Thank you for the questions.
One of the things I had to do today was trim my remarks a bit to meet the time frame that was allowed for us. I don't know if I did a very good job of explaining what I meant by the idea of these increased payroll taxes having an unintended consequence.
One of the issues here is that everybody who contributes to the Canada Pension Plan is eligible for benefits. If what we want to do is address seniors poverty, then, as somebody mentioned, we have a pretty blunt instrument here. Even millionaires are going to get the Canada Pension Plan. But we're not going to be able to allow people of modest means to have that same access to it because they aren't contributing as much money. Where we're getting this unintended consequence is that we're asking people to pay higher payroll taxes now on this promise of a future benefit. If somebody is in dire straits right now and has pressing financial circumstances, then, given the choice, they probably would elect to deal with whatever the emergency is today, such as paying down credit cards, paying for health care costs or education funding, or even meeting the basic necessities of life.
What the higher premiums with the enhanced CPP are going to mean is that choice of how to best use the dollars that are going to be spent on the Canada Pension Plan contributions is removed from the individual. As another presenter mentioned, there's the assumption that the government knows the best way for people to use their own money. I would prefer that we had a situation where more flexibility is given for people to decide what their priorities are, including making sure that they can live within their means today and not take too much money off the table now to increase the Canada Pension Plan later on.