Madam Speaker, I agree with the member's comments. There is a very serious issue with the present pension schemes. I am not going to suggest it is simple or that the federal government has all the levers at its disposal, but my friend identified the problem.
As I indicated in my remarks, it is a three-pronged scheme. The first two prongs are sound and are working well. However, the third prong, private savings, is not working. It has two components. There are the pension plans, and some of them are defined contribution or defined benefit, and there are the RRSPs and individual savings.
It is that third prong that is not working. We are seeing the middle class being squeezed out of the whole aspect for two reasons. One, the companies, not all but a lot of them, that used to offer defined benefit plans have abandoned them either for defined contribution plans or no plan at all. Then there is the idea of opening an RRSP. The member agrees with my earlier comments that this whole RRSP system has not worked out as well as was intended back when it was started about 50 years ago. We are seeing the results now. In Canada we do have extremely high MER rates compared to other foreign countries.
It is going to be a difficult hill for the Minister of Finance to climb. We cannot forget that the RRSP industry is controlled by the chartered banks and large financial institutions. The program generally is not meeting the original goals that were set for the program when it was first established.