It's a complex system because women's work lives define what their eligibility is going to be for all forms of pension support, with the exception of old age security, GIS, and the other low-income supports. On the one hand, what you see is deterioration in the quality and level of retirement income that's available, as defined benefit and defined contribution systems or hybrid systems are all dissipating and being replaced. This, I think, really should be a matter of government regulation, just like the minimum number of hours of paid work permitted under employment standards.
I do think that governments need to take a more active role in defining minimum levels of engagement and bring a stop to the trend toward precarious work. With respect to the CPP drop-out figure, it is a small figure. I see no reason for any sort of penny-pinching on that end of things. I think that the drop-out provision should be provided pervasively whenever any changes are made to CPP. CPP itself is getting more complex as changes are made to it, but I think it is important to protect the integrity of that system to the extent possible.
To bring in something that people don't understand concerns me greatly. In this connection, when pension-income splitting takes place, it deprives women of their fair share of what would have been their OAS and their GIS, because it deems them to have more income than they would ordinarily be seen as having with respect to eligibility for OAS. At the same time that pension-income splitting takes place, male pension income splitters get a larger share of OAS and GIS than they would have if they were being taxed on their actual pension income, and the women they are married to are seeing a fall in their OAS and GIS. Many married people do pool their income, and everybody has access to the same amount of income—but not everybody does. In any event, this is a form of high-income theft from low-income women that needs to be corrected, and it's part of the pension picture as well.