Madam Speaker, I agree we have an emerging crisis in pensions across the country. There are two aspects. One is the publicly funded pension, CPP, old age security, GIS. We know that many Canadians do not have access to private sector pensions and have not worked at jobs that have allowed them to invest money in RRSPs. We need improvements to those, and the bills and the motion the NDP presented earlier address what we are proposing as increases to public pensions, CPP, GIS, and OAS.
On the other side of the coin are private sector pensions. The member mentioned AbitibiBowater and Nortel. There are many other companies in the country that, although they have not gone bankrupt, their financial futures are uncertain.
The NDP has proposed that in those cases those workers would move to the top of the list when we speak about payouts. The NDP has also proposed that there be a fund put in place, a pension insurance protection scheme that would protect those workers' pensions when, through no fault of their own, their company goes under and their pensions, all the money they paid in all their working lives, are lost.