I have argued very often that the answer is on our face in terms of, sadly, the tragedy of employer pensions failing, as we've seen with Sears, Nortel, and so forth, but we have brought it upon ourselves through this fraud that we have perpetrated on ourselves for the last 20 or 30 years in Canada. It's called “Freedom 55.” I believe that Freedom 55 is a fraud. It is an arithmetical economic fraud. It says that you can work for 20 or 30 years and go at age 55. We know life expectancy for a male is 81 and for a female is 84, so you can collect $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 a year for the next 35 years and everything is going to be fine. Does anybody believe that you and your employer and the investment returns fully funded that kind of retirement in the 20 or 30 years you were working? Of course not.
We are not only putting people out and retiring them when we need more and more people in the workforce because of the aging, but we're creating a policy problem called “unfunded pension liabilities”, which is irresponsible. That's why chief economist Fred Vettese has argued for adopting the CPP model of age 60 to 70, with flexibility to the citizen. You take a penalty if you retire below 65, which is the current situation anyway with CPP, by the way, under the reforms, and you take a top-up if you go after 65. You boost your pension payout if you take your CPP after that.
We should adopt that across the board as the policy option, and in the process get rid of early retirement below 60.