Finance committee  You want me to respond, I gather.

Finance committee  I don't see retiring--I think “freedom 55” is a fraud. We are living to 80 and 85. My mother passed away last fall at 93, living in her own home. There are a lot of people living. We can't retire at 55 and be fully sustained.

Finance committee  Can I correct you on one thing, Mr. Marston?

Finance committee  Yes, I agree completely. In the last several months I've been to some academic conferences, seminars, discussions on pension, and it's quite astonished me. That's why I led with the slide from the OECD. When you listen to people in the academic community, and I suppose some of the public sector unions, you would think there's an apocalyptic crisis in Canada with pensions.

Finance committee  Exactly. So I hope that you as members of Parliament proceed cautiously.

Finance committee  I'm going to speak against my own interest. I think public sector pensions are too generous. My pension is too generous. I think the private sector, the small-business sector, is being mercilessly exploited, to use the language of social democracy. We need to reduce the pensions in the public sector to even out the differences with the private.

Finance committee  No, I agree with you completely. I like your phrase, too, “let a thousand flowers bloom”, as long as it's not mandatory.

Finance committee  I agree with you. The pushback and the criticism that we've seen by ordinary Canadians has been on the very unfairness of a pension that fails. So either the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act has to be modified or, preferably, a private sector insurance corporation. We have the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is analogous in banking, and you, as a former banker—

Finance committee  I'm studying that right now, and I can't answer the question as to whether it is viable. I'm not sure what level.... It really depends on the effectiveness of the regulation by OSFI, at the front end, what level of premiums are required.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the invitation today. I have some slides. Some of them will be information or data that are familiar to some people, but I think it's worth reviewing them, and then I'll come to my conclusions. I'll try to be as brief as possible for the committee. There are four things I want to talk about: first, whether there in fact is a pension crisis; secondly, the failure by many pension researchers in the academic community to include home equity as a savings towards pensions; third, the minimum pensionable age; and fourth, a failure to produce a level playing field between the private and public sectors.

Industry committee  I've copied the Brookings study, which by the way was in 2006, and I have also copied onto the clerk's laptop the Bank of Canada 2008 study of merchant attitudes towards the relative cost of payments. I have also copied the Federal Reserve study of the central bank of Australia.

Finance committee  I've copied the Brookings study, which by the way was in 2006, and I have also copied onto the clerk's laptop the Bank of Canada 2008 study of merchant attitudes towards the relative cost of payments. I have also copied the Federal Reserve study of the central bank of Australia.

Industry committee  This is a feature of the modern economy, this complexity of the product lines. On what you were saying about all the bells and whistles, there are over 200 credit cards. It reminds me of walking into a shoe store; it's just an amazing blizzard of options. Or buying a car.... In most consumer markets today, they're much more sophisticated than back in the fifties, when you went into a store and they had two of everything.

Industry committee  But I'm answering your question. I said this is a feature of consumer product markets across the economy. That's number one. Number two, the consumer makes that choice.

Industry committee  Those credit cards or those shoes or whatever that are not going to meet the needs of consumers will wither and die. Surely it's not the role of the legislators to determine, or to pick, winners and losers among product lines. So if you've shifted from picking winners and losers among credit card companies to saying let's pick winners and losers among product lines, that's called business strategy, and that's the role of the entrepreneur, not of Parliament.