Finance committee  Thank you for inviting me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here today. I would first like to emphasize that I am here as an independent analyst who is very concerned about the current pension crisis. The views and opinions expressed today are solely mine and do not repre

Finance committee  Worse still, some pension funds used government balance sheets to sell credit default swaps, which are basically insurance policies on credit default obligations. Unlike AIG, they did not sell CDS on subprime mortgages, but once the credit crisis spread to all credit tranches, in

Finance committee  I worked at the Caisse from 2001 to 2003.

Finance committee  It's what I observed almost everywhere. The problem does not affect only the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec; it also affects the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and PSP Investments. However, at the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, reference indicators best reflected

Finance committee  Monumentally mistaken, indeed, but they weren't the only ones.

Finance committee  Some reference indicators properly reflected the risk involved, but this wasn't the case for other indicators. A perfect example of this situation is commercial paper. In the case of Treasury bonds, the associated risks were much higher than what the reference index let on.

Finance committee  Are you asking me if I analyzed commercial paper?

Finance committee  Honestly, no. I worked in the private sector, in hedge funds and commodities, but I had never had to write a document for a board of directors on the subject of commercial paper. If I did have to write something, of course it would not be that—

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  I don't think any pension fund of the large Canadian pension funds should be paying bonuses this year, period, especially if they've lost the amount of money they've lost, and in the way they lost the money. That's very important. It's not just losing money; it's where you lost m

Finance committee  You have touched on a point I have written about in my blog. The quality and the independence of the board of directors of these large plans is very important, and if you keep putting in the same people from the financial industry, basically it's like a big club. They all know ea

Finance committee  Quite frankly, that is a political question. Honestly, it wasn't just about seeking a return, but also about taking into account the risk that was involved.

Finance committee  There is an absolute need for a national pension regulator that deals with both public and private pension plans. It's about time we get on to that. You can look at what is going on in the U.K. We have to start looking around the world to see what other countries are doing, wheth

Finance committee  The big shift into alternative investments happened after the tech crash. There were pension funds like the Ontario teachers that got in early with hedge funds, real estate, and private equity, but the major shift happened after the tech crash of 2001. I'd like to touch upon a p

Finance committee  I think it's important that we start giving more flexibility to people. For example, I leave the caisse or PSP Investments and I want to take my pension moneys, in my own pension fund, and put it with my current employer. I can't do that. There is no pension portability. These t