Thank you, Madam Chair.
In your brief, on page 5, you state that as of March 31, 2008, the annual average retirement benefit paid to women retired from the federal public service was $17,061, which is 62,7% of the annual average amount paid to their retired male counterparts. You know that the poverty line is somewhere around $23,000. Consequently, with $17,000, these women are definitely below the poverty line. This leads me to the last sentence of your document where it says: “However, available data do not allow us to state that retirement benefits paid under the Public Service Superannuation Act are sufficient to keep all beneficiaries out of poverty.“ This suggests that your plan does not protect everybody against poverty.
This brings me to the position of the Canadian Labour Congress which you support. In various documents that have been tabled by different witnesses, it says that 55% of women get their main income from the public plans, i.e. the Quebec Pension Plan or the Canada Pension Plan. This is due to the fact the companies where they are employed do not have a pension plan that would complement the combined amount of the CPP benefit and Old Age Security benefit, depending on your eligibility. This means that they are very close to the poverty line.
The CLC proposes to increase the replacement rate from 25% to 50% over the long term, which would clearly help those women who are not in or who leave the labour market, either to raise children or to become informal caregivers, caring for elderly relatives.
I would like to hear your views on this. Furthermore, several witnesses said they would like to see a national summit on pensions in Canada, to discuss all pensions but more specifically the issue of women's pensions. I would like to hear your views on this, even if this makes for a lot of questions.