I know. I'm already at risk that the CAS will pick up my kid.
I want to add just a couple of things to what Dan has said. He's absolutely right. The culture on Bay Street has really changed. I don't have time to get into it now, but I would direct members of the committee to look at some of the documents that Diane Urquhart, an independent financial expert, has been promoting lately to really describe what's going on in bankruptcy courts today, where you actually have a whole class of interests that literally use what's called the “junk bond” industry, very minimal bonds. What they often do, in a predatory way, for companies going into bankruptcy protection, is buy up those bonds, knowing that the bankruptcy procedure is a tax-sponsored procedure. For every dollar they invest in getting ahead of workers getting to their pension money, they often make $1.30. It's a very profitable business. There are a lot of hedge funds, private equity funds, and vulture funds that are involved in this. At the moment, Canada has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the only places in the world that allows those sorts of junk bond holders to buy their own insurance. They're called credit default swaps. What they do is buy their own insurance going into a bankruptcy proceeding, so they're completely covered, and they often make $1.30 on every dollar they invest, and they rank ahead of pensioners right now. The Nortel pensioners are finding this out from first-hand experience. The Canwest experience is ongoing. We don't know what will happen there, but definitely there will be pension cuts. AbitibiBowater....
I want to tell you two quick stories before leaving, because I want the voices of these workers to be heard here. I was in New Brunswick three weeks ago, and I spoke to a worker from Nackawic, New Brunswick, whose pulp and paper plant closed in 2004 with a 52% funded pension, but she didn't get a 52% funded pension. After all the creditors who were ahead of her picked through the carcass of her employer, she got $400, after 16 years of service—not $400 a month, not $400 a year, but a commutative value of $400. That's fact. It's happening all over the place, in Ontario and Quebec in the manufacturing sector; in B.C., in northern Ontario, and the Atlantic in the forestry sector; and we're seeing it with some of these large, formerly blue-chip federal sector employers.
The unfortunate thing is, the federal government's announcement today, while I hope it's well-intentioned, has no intervention in the bankruptcy proceedings, which is federal jurisdiction, to be completely clear. The government of the day could bring in an emergency system of pension insurance. It could tell Canadians that they will adopt the pension plans that Canadians have in bankruptcy court at their full value—so a 52% funded pension would be a 52% pension. It could even rank up their status in bankruptcy hearings. The announcements today do some positive things, but they don't get to the eye of the hurricane right now, which is bankruptcy proceedings, where people are losing decades and decades of work.
I would hope this committee could forward a statement to the government that there's an urgency here. Nortel pensioners, particularly the long-term disabled, are literally moving from a regime where they got a workplace pension to the social assistance or welfare system. That's the reality now. I would encourage you to be a voice for those people.