The only real protection you have is the health of the company itself. I think the circumstances with Nortel, General Motors, and others have indicated this.
The concern I have is that there is a different attitude in the Canadian corporate world than there used to be. I could go on and explain this. To give an example, as a young manager with Bell Canada, one of my duties was to visit all the pensioners in my territory. It was my obligation to report if I found any who had health problems, etc., or financial problems; we actually attended to that. We actually increased pensions so that people would be able to be self-sufficient. But there is no real protection.
The insurance I was talking about--and I refer back to the wind-up of Confederation Life in the mid 1990s. Some people think today that insurance companies don't fail. That was one of the top insurance companies of the world that failed. The decision the court made, that Judge Houlden made, was that the policyholders, which included pensioners, were entitled to be ahead of all other creditors. It was surprising to me when I looked back, because when that court decision was made, there wasn't an unsecured creditor represented in the court--not very bright.
That is the case for insurance companies, and I'm asking the very question that I think you're addressing: why don't we have the same thing for pension plans? Why aren't they treated similarly to insurance provisions in that same category, in pensions and other policies?
The other thing that occurred during the decision on Confederation Life is that it was determined that.... It took five years to do the wind-up, by the way. During that five years, the liquidator was obliged to accumulate and pay compound interest on the value of these pension plans. I'm going to shock you because interest rates at that time were between 14% and 18%. Most of the policyholders walked away with more interest than they did principal.
So can't we look at innovative ways? I'm hearing from the experts that we can't change the bankruptcy act. Well then don't change the bankruptcy act. Make this pension program somewhat similar to what we already have in the insurance policies.