Another idea that's been talked about and that I think would be very helpful to women would be to allow all working Canadians to contribute to the maximum contributions of CPP. Right now if you're a low-income worker, as many women are, then you only can contribute a certain amount. Therefore that affects the pension you receive later on.
If you could contribute the full amount, and maybe get your employer also to contribute an extra amount, or contribute both the employee and employer amount yourself, this would be much more useful than actually purchasing an RRSP with the same amount of money. You would be doing yourself a much greater service to assure yourself that when you retired you had the full CPP. It would be allowing all Canadians, those who wanted to, to up their contributions to get the maximum.
That would be a very easy change. I've heard the actuaries from both QPP and CPP say how this would be possible to do. The plan is set up. A very easy thing would be a voluntary program, which would allow people to actually assure themselves that they could get a full pension.