Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague back to the House of Commons after what I hope was a very restful Christmas break for him as well. I know how hard he works on behalf of seniors and I am sure he spent a lot of time talking to them. Therefore, I would hope he had an open mind when he was communicating with them.
We are not only dealing with seniors, but we are dealing with future seniors, future pensioners. Part of the government's overall strategy is to ensure that our wonderful system, which is the envy of the world, is there for our children and grandchildren and that we do not offload that burden of an unsustainable program on to them.
The Canada pension plan, as the hon. member mentioned, is a very good system. However, we have communicated with many businesses, as well as individuals who are part of that mandatory program, and they do not think this is the time, when businesses are struggling and coming out of the recession, to increase their burden. This provides an option for those businesses that want to provide a retirement plan for their employees to be part of this, to simplify the process.
As I reflected in my speech, many businesses find it a challenge. They are struggling to keep their businesses going. They are trying to grow their businesses. At the same time, they want to offer this to their employees.
In the long term, we continue to look at Canada pension plan. We share that jurisdiction with the provinces. We cannot make any arbitrary changes to Canada pension plan without the support of the provinces. We did not have unanimous support among the provinces to expand CPP at this moment. We did, however, have unanimous support from the provinces to move forward with the PRPP framework.