Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
And thank you to the witnesses for being here.
My first question is to Professor Schirle.
One of the things I'm very interested in hearing about, and maybe you can comment as well as the officials, is that in the last ten years there's been a dramatic difference in the way women are looking at retirement, and the way retirement will actually be for them, as opposed to older Canadian women.
I wonder, first of all, if you can comment on the role of education in financial matters. I'm wondering about the role of financial planning in the big picture and how many women view it as an individual and how many view it in the context of a couple. For example, if a woman decides to stay at home and raise her children, she and her husband make that decision. Part of that decision process is that they'll be losing some of their pension income, which means they need to make greater contributions to a spousal RRSP, which maybe means their taxes will be reduced and they'll have a little more disposable income either to save or.... Obviously that's part of a big plan. Then when they do retire, government has introduced income splitting between seniors, so it won't be as much about how much the woman's pension is and how much the man's is, because they can actually split it.
Can you comment on financial planning and looking at the big picture and how much is done in the context of spouses, as opposed to men or women?