Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear these members defend the MP pension plan. I invite the hon. member to join me in any place in the country. We will round up 1,000 people. The hon. member can defend the MP pension plan and I will argue against it. At the end of the day I do not think there will be much question about where the Canadian public stands.
With respect to the member's substantive question at the beginning, when I say we propose to guarantee the CPP benefits to the existing generation of seniors and make provisions for others, we
intend to guarantee the entire range of benefits. We are not just speaking about retirement income.
With respect to survivor benefits, under this expanded RRSP program we propose a substantial improvement over CPP. We propose to improve the retirement incomes of surviving spouses, particularly elderly widows, by proposing that 100 per cent of the funds of a deceased individual's RRSP would be transferable to a surviving spouse tax free. Nobody would have to go hat in hand. That is a far superior survivor benefit to that offered by CPP.