Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is François L'Italien and I am the coordinator of l'Observatoire de la retraite.
Here are a few words about our organization, which has been in existence since 2014. Our organization has two main missions: first, to produce and encourage economic research on retirement to deepen knowledge on this issue of general interest; second, to contribute to the public debate on retirement by disseminating knowledge that is likely to raise the civic competence of Quebeckers on this issue.
We bring together 14 major institutional and organizational partners in Quebec, including fund managers, the major retiree associations and the main labour unions.
L'Observatoire de la retraite has been interested in the issue of the impact of corporate restructuring on retirees for several years now, since pension protection is a fundamental concern for us and for Quebec society.
We agreed to contribute to the work of the committee with respect to Bill C‑253 to highlight the existence of a structural problem with the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, namely, in our view, the overrepresentation of the interests of a particular group in the restructurings that are carried out under this act.
Since 2010, as you know, there have been many cases of company restructurings or bankruptcies that have led to pension cuts for pensioners, and these have often been in the media. We need only think of White Birch Paper, Sears Canada and Groupe Capitales Médias, to mention just a few. These cases not only showed the powerlessness of the retirees affected by the restructuring, but they also highlighted a legal process where those directly affected by the restructuring could not speak out or negotiate. It is a legal process that justifies an increasingly unfair distribution of the benefits and risks of financial restructuring.
With the hindsight provided by these repeated restructurings, the process, actors and effects of restructurings are becoming better documented and known, and make us see aspects of the legislative and legal framework of the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act that the legislator probably did not see at the very beginning. The further we go, the more we see that a law that is intended to revive companies in difficulty opens the way to business strategies that have nothing to do with difficulties suffered. In fact, we are seeing the emergence, more and more, of a pattern in which defined benefit plans are being undermined.
The structural problem that we have to deal with in the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, which is I think the subject of Bill C‑253, is the fact that the best organized financial players, the privileged creditors, preferred creditors and business owners, who are by the same token the least vulnerable to financial shocks, emerge with a significant advantage in the restructuring process when compared to other stakeholders, including pension plans.
These financial actors may of course suffer losses in the process, that is not the point, but these are nothing like those of other stakeholders, starting with pension plan members who are at a very vulnerable point in their lives. Since the pension plan's claim against the company is not considered a priority claim or entitled to the same protection as employees' wages, resorting to the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act has virtually become a way to wind up the plans and this directly affects people's lives.
Unlike the large financial firms and business owners who file under the CCAA, who manage wealth and have large incomes, these are real people with limited financial resources at a time in their lives when they cannot financially recover.
The case of White Birch Paper was very clear in this regard. On the one hand, we saw that the CEOs of Black Diamond Capital and White Birch funds, who proceeded to buy the company, benefited from the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act by fetching more than $4.2 million in interest charges and $12 million in professional fees. On the other, we saw retirees whose pensions were cut by 20% to 30%.
This inequality between large financial organizations and pension plan members not only creates immeasurable economic consequences, but generates an increasingly widespread sense of economic injustice.
In addition, as the number of restructuring cases rises, trust in public institutions is beginning to fray.