I mentioned the number of people who are employed in so-called non-standard jobs, the kind that you've just outlined—contract work, temporary work, and so on. As I said, 40% of women's jobs are now those kinds of jobs, compared with 30% of men's jobs. Most of those jobs have instability built in. They don't have benefits; they don't have pensions. So people who are in those kinds of jobs.... In total, 35% of all employment in Canada is in that kind of work. So they are not likely to have pension plans. They're not likely to develop pension plans, because they don't have permanent full-time long-term employees. This means the public pension plans become even more important.
The CPP does cover those jobs. Part-time workers are covered by the CPP. Self-employed workers are covered by the CPP. Despite some witnesses who have appeared before you saying they weren't, they are. The problem is that they have to pay double contributions. They have to pay the employer part and the employee part. So it becomes very expensive.
Let's say you're somebody working on your own on contract, but technically you're self-employed. If you want to be in the CPP, you must pay 9.9% of your earnings to the plan, whereas if you were working for a big company, the employer would pay half and you'd pay the other half. So it makes it very difficult for younger workers to contribute, even to the CPP.
There is one thing that could be done and I think this would be worth exploring. There is a tax credit for contributions to the CPP. At the end of the 1990s, when discussions on changes to the financing of the plan were going on, it was suggested that changes be made to that tax credit--that it could be improved for lower-income workers and that it might even be adapted to be based on a person's income, so that the lower the income the better the credit would be. Various things like that could be done to make it easier for younger people and people in those unstable jobs to contribute to the plan.
Another possibility would be to regulate temporary health agencies and make them like employers. This comes under labour standards legislation, which is a provincial matter, and also federal for those federally regulated employers. If temporary health agencies were technically employers, then they would have to contribute to the plan on behalf of the people they employ.
So it's a number of things like this that should be explored to make it easier for younger workers like those you describe to do their contributions to the plan, so that they will get pensions from the CPP when they come to retirement.