Thank you.
If I can make a further comment, I think the bottom line is that some bonds--many bonds--can be insured, and the fact is that retirement is apparently not insured at all.
One of the things I hope my bill does is provide some measure of insurance for those people who work for 40 years, put their money in faithfully every paycheque, and expect there will be something there at the end.
Mr. Casey, I'm not sure if you realize it, but my involvement with the forest industry is one of the main reasons I decided to put this bill forward, so I'll leave my last question for you.
Employer after employer, mill after mill, has gone under, and not just in my riding and in northwestern Ontario, but right across Canada. There have been 35,000 direct jobs that have been lost in forestry in the last year. There are 1,000 direct and indirect forest jobs a month that continue to be lost in Ontario, and that's just in Ontario. That's why I'm here and that's why I tabled the bill.
Your industry and your companies, quite frankly, have let too many people down. I understand that you're a lobby group and you don't include all the forest companies--in fact, a rather small percentage of forest companies are under your umbrella--but underfunding pension plans and spending the termination and severance pay of workers is something that some in your industry have done on a regular basis. It's unconscionable.
Do forest product members not feel an obligation to live up to the contractual obligations they enter into voluntarily, such as paying people's wages and severance and making sure they contribute the full amount to the pension?