Finance committee  If you mean under their legislation, I haven't looked under their legislation, but I think--

Finance committee  I'll be pleased to. I want to begin by responding to something that Mr. Paillé said. I don't want to leave the impression that scholarship has nothing to do with the problems of real people in the real world. I grew up on a farm in eastern Ontario. I dropped out of high school in grade 12 and I was on the wrong side of the tracks for a long time.

Finance committee  Yes, and the effect is greater on smaller economies like Canada than on large economies like the U.S. This is the conclusion of this economist, who's on the payroll. She's not in the private sector, she's not a lobbyist; she's an employee of the Federal Reserve. It's as if she were working for the Bank of Canada.

Finance committee  I'll be very brief. She has found that the incidence in small, open economies—Sweden and Canada—falls on workers. In economies like the States, it's passed on more frequently through the higher incidence of the cost of goods or services.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for inviting me again. I'm not allowed to present the slides, but they're reproduced. I want to run through the disclosures first because I think they're important. I don't have any investments or consulting contracts of any kind anywhere in the world. I am a poor professor.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Not on the savings side. If you have so many years and start later collecting, you don't have as much money to fund. That was the logic of that. But I'm collecting data on the Europeans, because the Europeans are way ahead of us in this respect of pushing back retirement age. This is happening just in the last two, three, or four years because of their massive deficits as they confront these unsustainable pensions.

Finance committee  Well, Ms. Swift brought that up. I never thought that this would be announced overnight. It would produce a revolution. It would be staged, as they did with social security in the States, where they are moving it back and it's announced ten years in advance of the change so that people can make adjustments to their financial planning.

Finance committee  I'll give a very short answer. I think you have to get the data on this, the empirical data, to definitively answer what percentage of Canadians are downsizing or converting their home equity into retirement savings. Right now we're all talking about it, but we don't have hard data.

Finance committee  You've asked a good question. No, she wasn't; she lived there. I'm not suggesting that all homeowners, when they turn 65, liquidate their homes. I am doing research on this right now. I wish I could give the data to you. I can't really disagree with Ms. Di Vito. I don't have the data.

Finance committee  Do you mean if we increased the minimum pensionable age? It would reduce the pressure on pensions. It would reduce the payouts. Right now, in the public service, you can retire at 55, as you know.

Finance committee  I don't disagree with what you said in principle, but I really do think the solution is raising the retirement age. Whether it's age 70 or not, one can quibble over that, but if we look toward increasing it—I shouldn't have said the retirement age, I should have said the pensionable age, because you can retire when you want, just fund it yourself—the pensionable age is critical.

Finance committee  I showed you the OECD slide.

Finance committee  We have the second-lowest level of poverty in the world.

Finance committee  You were speaking about poverty. You were talking about young people or middle-aged people. Yes, but when they turn 65 that's why we created the old age pension and the GIS. They are not poor, because the statistics are showing it.