Finance committee  Bonjour. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. In order to cover key points in seven minutes, I have borrowed a format from David Letterman: The top ten things the federal government can do to improve the retirement income system available to Canadians are.... T

Finance committee  It's a technical subject.

Finance committee  It's essentially the same kind of product. It just meets definitions set out by the IRS instead of Revenue Canada. The limits are somewhat different.

Finance committee  Or that you recognize that they have retirement savings products that are essentially not biased in favour of the highly compensated. The qualified plan rules serve much the same purposes the registered plan rules do here. If somebody moves across the border, they can't current

Finance committee  Calgary has a fairly high percentage of Americans who cross the border and work in Calgary for a while, or Canadians who get transferred to Houston with Shell. There's a fair bit of mobility in the Calgary market, and I know there's more than that in the Windsor corridor. So I wo

Finance committee  You don't have a number three?

Finance committee  Certainly. I'll give you this one.

Finance committee  The CPPIB has had a very good track record over the past ten years or so. Managing separate plans and potentially keeping track of individual participants is not what they do now. It would be a very different infrastructure.

Finance committee  Raising the replacement ratio to 50% is a little too large. It's like hitting the tack with a sledgehammer. It's in the right direction but it's a bit too heavy-handed. The research report that my colleague Jack Mintz worked on with Mr. Menzies and his office in the fall indica

Finance committee  I think that's my point. I don't know that there is much of a rationale behind it. Essentially we're seeing a lot of retirement savings occurring through group RRSPs, which is a mechanism that was designed with individuals in mind. When we see an employer deciding whether to do

Finance committee  This is when the employer is choosing whether to offer a DC plan or a group RRSP. If they choose to offer the group RRSP, they're implicitly choosing to pay higher payroll taxes.

Finance committee  No, group RRSP, by definition, is closer to a DC plan.

Finance committee  No, it seems to be an evolution in the marketplace. The RRSP, which was originally designed for individuals to go to the bank on February 28 to stick money in an account, has been adapted to provide efficiencies and economies of scale by covering a few hundred people at a time.

Finance committee  And it perhaps costs the employee. It more likely leads to lower enrolment by the employees because they have that much less disposable income.

Finance committee  That is precisely what I meant. I have a 22-page booklet with 11 rows listing the different requirements in 11 different jurisdictions for pension law and pension compliance. It adds an incredible administrative burden and has to add to the cost of any employer's plan. If you wan