Finance committee  I can hear you and I hope you can hear me.

Finance committee  Thank you for inviting me. It appears that Canada has approximately a 15-year pension reform cycle. We created the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans in 1965. Fifteen years later, we looked at the supplementary pension arrangements, employment-based pension plans, and RRSPs, and c

Finance committee  It's a classic example of what can happen if you assume that risk will turn into return.

Finance committee  History is useful here, the history of these contracts becoming increasingly binding over the decades. It's an important piece of the background to this thing. If we look at this today, we see that the question all the way through has been the fact that through the 1980s and 199

Finance committee  The company can go bankrupt and you will have a situation like we just heard of in terms of disability and pension liabilities. All of a sudden you get this jarring halt and the whole thing comes to a jarring end. The only way to deal with that is in fact to go to the same kind o

Finance committee  I can hear you, yes.

Finance committee  I have to say that I found the previous speaker's answer quite compelling, and mine is very much the same. I think we have a national issue of how we address poverty. There's a whole discussion around what the poverty level is and how you calculate that and how you provide income

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, if I could add to that, what I said earlier is in fact a response to your question, which is to start regulating defined benefit plans the same way we regulate banks and insurance companies. In other words, if you have risk on a balance sheet, you must have a risk buff

Finance committee  In the short term, that might help some workers some of the time, but it doesn't fundamentally deal with the question that defined benefit arrangements, especially in the private sector, are incomplete contracts even today. So you always have this property rights problem. The on

Finance committee  I assume the question is to me.

Finance committee  Thank you. I don't think we need to look at other countries; we just need to look at the fundamental concept of insurance. If we want to apply the principle of an insurance promise that's going to be kept, it has to be funded. If you go to the notion of allowing companies to sel

Finance committee  That's what we should do prospectively. There's still the retrospective question of what we do with people today who didn't have the benefit of that kind of protection. That's a separate issue.

Finance committee  I haven't done the analysis myself. I know of analyses other people have done. In fact, maybe our speaker from the OECD is better positioned to answer this question. I know that the priority requirement does exist in some European jurisdictions. My understanding is that it has no

Finance committee  Yes. I co-founded a company called CEM Benchmarking, which measures the pension costs around the world. We have very good data on global experience from a company based right here in Toronto. If you take the Canadian numbers, for example, and divide them into wholesale and retai

Finance committee  That was a very different situation, because basically they said we're going to take your money unless you stop us. Here, with auto-enrolment, we're saying we're going to allow you to put your own money into a pension account that you still own if you allow us to do it. I think t