Finance committee  The only comment I'd make is that it hasn't been made back. One thing you have to understand about the pension math is that if you lose 20% one year and you make 10% the next, you're still down 10%. But that's not the big thing. The big thing is that you weren't supposed to do z

Finance committee  It's not enough to get to being even.

Finance committee  I'm guessing that for somebody whose money is in for 25 years, it would work out to something like that. It's easy arithmetic to do.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Sure.

Finance committee  I did want to comment on the fees in the British plan because I'm not sure people are properly understanding them. So in essence, understand how these fees work. There is a fee on contributions and then there's a fee on your assets. If you trace a contribution, it goes in one ye

Finance committee  —every dollar that goes in is paying 2% 25 times before it comes out. That's a third of your savings gone in fees. As for what the British did, they have a very low fee on assets of 30 basis points. They've introduced—albeit late in the game, and everybody is upset—a 2% fee on

Finance committee  The math there is very important, because if your retirement savers end up losing 5% of their savings along the way, they're hugely ahead of losing 30% of their savings along the way.

Finance committee  The way you traditionally try to make benefits safer--if you're going to choose risky investments--is to put more money aside than you think you need so that if you lose some of it, you've still got enough. Here's the problem with defined benefit plans. Employers don't want to d

Finance committee  I'm not sure that I was the one talking about that.

Finance committee  Let's understand what that statistic is. That isn't the replacement rate of someone with average income in Canada; that's the replacement rate for someone with average income in Canada who's not a member of a workplace pension plan and who never saves a dime their whole life. Tha

Finance committee  Yes. I am not averse to expanding the CPP. I would do it by taking the earning ceiling up, not by taking the 25% up. But here's the thing: any extension of the CPP now, in order to treat the children fairly, has to be fully funded. You should ask the question. If the existing C

Finance committee  It would make more sense to ask the corporations that than to ask me. I think it would complicate the borrowing of money for some of them, but they would know that better. I want to point out something else about the way these plans are supposed to work. Pension plans used to be

Finance committee  Do you mean government insurance or private insurance?

Finance committee  I have no problem with going down that road, but let's just be honest about it. Everybody has tried to find a way to make this self-supporting. To date, nobody has succeeded. It's a difficult thing to do. But if we think that's a good use of public funds, let's say that from time