No one will ever forget what happened to Nortel in 2008.
Canaccord Capital estimated that BIMCOR also had a full 58% of the BCE pension fund riding on the stock market, and that pension lost about $2.8 billion in that year alone. The comment I have for you, Mr. Farrell, is to ask you to please go back to your membership and ask them to start investing conservatively—in bonds instead of stocks—and simply live up to their fiduciary and, I would say, legal obligations to the pensioners. That's just a comment that I want to make, because I think we need to be clear.
The next question is for Mr. Lopez. We need to be clear that there has been a lot of mismanagement here too. You talk about markets, and certainly that has been a problem in the wood industry, but what you don't talk about is that for decades and decades, the forest industry, instead of making investments where they should have--in their properties and elsewhere--paid shareholders when times were good. The industry has always been like this, but when times have been good, management has failed to make those investments. Abitibi is, I think, a good example. When you talk about management and you talk about the kinds of decisions management makes, I will put it to you that in terms of Bowater, Abitibi was maybe not the best investment to make for the forest industry.
There are problems with the market, absolutely, but let us not forget that these companies were not always well managed. I just want to put that to you.
You said earlier that you didn't know how many pensions would have been saved if Bill C-501 had been there, and later you corrected yourself when you said they would all be saved. Of course they would. That was actually my question for you, and you answered it. Thank you for that.
I have questions for Mr. Robertson.
Thank you for joining us, Mr. Robertson. I'm sure you're aware that in my riding of Thunder Bay—Rainy River you have two plants that are still operating, and they represent thousands of current and former workers who depend on AbitibiBowater for their income and for their retirement, so I'm glad to see you here.
Bill C-501 was tabled partly because of the problems that AbitibiBowater is having and will hopefully soon be out of. You entered supervised restructuring partly because your executives, the board of directors, and the pension plan administrators failed to live up to their simple obligations to adequately fund the pension plan. That's one of the reasons you're there. I see that your job tasks you with saving a company that perhaps has not been as well run as it could have been over the last number of decades. You talk about more than $1 billion, and so in essence you have reneged on some of your duties there with regard to pensions.
My questions today are posed in that context. I'm hoping you'll be brief, because I have some other questions too.