Finance committee  That's one of the reasons for the technical suggestion that might increase some of the economic efficiency and functioning in that marketplace.

Finance committee  And there was a major Calgary company that switched from defined contributions back to defined benefits. So it's the exception rather than the rule, but it's still out there.

Finance committee  I was speaking in terms of the aggregate statistics.

Finance committee  No, I don't believe I am.

Finance committee  There are some requirements. I may have my federal and provincial requirements a little muddled in this one, but if a plan is winding up even partially, it must convert all the assets from the pension into an annuity. Given that the annuity market seems to be very constrained and

Finance committee  In the market there are a number of factors. One seems to be that annuities are very capital-intensive for the financial institution. Another is that, among people buying annuities, there tends to be a huge amount of adverse selection: only healthy people with grandmothers who li

Finance committee  Yes. But they were not my studies that I cited. There's no doubt that 95% of not very much is still not very much.

Finance committee  The way to deal with that is not to talk about replacement ratios. If it needs to be raised, then perhaps look at the OAS and GIS and say, “How little is too little?“ It's really a separate question from the pension issue.

Finance committee  Eliminating the complexity would help a lot, but the risk and.... The employment world has changed. People staying with one employer for 40 years is no longer the norm.

Finance committee  Therefore the defined benefit's a harder thing to match up with employment.

Finance committee  Right now there are rules that prohibit the comingling of funds. So if a union plan wants to have a multi-employer-sponsored arrangement they can, with the union named as the plan sponsor. If a bunch of small ski resort operators want to get together to have a pension plan, pool

Finance committee  If you're going to do this on a fully funded basis, that means we start collecting the taxes today. The people who will have actually doubled their replacement ratio will see those benefit cheques in about 40 years. So a lot of it is a concern about paying for 40 years before any

Finance committee  It could be. There's a very small window of people with insufficient retirement savings--below a 50% replacement ratio benchmark. Not everybody who has no pension plan has inadequate retirement income. It's a relatively small group and tends to be in the lower-middle to middle cl

Finance committee  Certainly. The research that was done in the fall for the ministry was the first time the databases that are available out there actually put pension plans and group RRSPs in the same study. They're among some of the first studies that look at what other assets people have, perha

Finance committee  No. I'm suggesting that the plan sponsor be given the option of including the negative option, as you so eloquently referred to it. The plan can be designed with an opt-out kind of feature.