Yes. In terms of poverty, you need a pension system that's working for most Canadians. In terms of our pension system, we've put a lot of our eggs in Canada in the workplace pension basket. We have comparatively a pretty small public pension system. When you look at other equivalent OECD countries, our public pension system, our CPP and OAS, is actually comparatively pretty small.
We have put a lot of eggs in the basket of workplace pension plans. Our philosophy is that those have to work out for most people. The experience, of course, is that they don't. We've never in our history cracked 50% pension coverage. We got close, but it's been going down, and we're now at about 40%. The characteristic of that 40% has become less generous and less secure too. That's why the labour movement thinks that the only real solution is an expansion of public pensions, and that's why we've put such great effort into it. We've been saying the same thing for 50 years.
We started this campaign in 2009 to expand the CPP. I don't think the fact that we have a partial win is reason for us to back away from that philosophy. I don't think we expect a lot of Canadians to all of a sudden have workplace pension plans or tax-free savings accounts to save us all. Our view is that the one and only solution is bigger public pensions. We've had this increase in the CPP. We could certainly look at an increase in the OAS. Given this long-run indexing issue, I think there's fiscal room there and I think there's reason to do it.