Defined benefits are always, as we say, the gold standard of pension plans. They are extremely important for maintaining economic security. Historically, especially when they were excluded from paid labour at the same level as men, women were often not covered by pension plans of any type, including CPP or any type of workplace plan. OAS and GIS have been extremely instrumental in reducing seniors' poverty, particularly for single women.
The Canadian pension system is designed in a way that it has to be supplemented by private plans, whether that third pillar is through your private savings or a workplace plan. We see that through private savings people simply cannot put enough money away to save as much as they will need in retirement through RRSPs, TFSAs, or whatever mechanism it may be. People's wages are stagnating, debt is increasing, and people simply cannot save as much money as they're told they are supposed to.
Defined benefit plans are the best way to supplement the public pension system. They should not be at the expense of the public pension system or anything like that, but having that defined, reliable income in retirement that the employer is required to fund properly—they have solvency funding requirements and things like that, which ensure they're actually funding their pension plans—is something that we need to maintain to make sure that people have a reliable income in retirement and that it can't simply be changed at any time. The strict funding rules that go along with having defined benefit plans ensure, to some extent at least, that those will actually be funded, and they are funded collectively in a way that private plans are not.