Finance committee  Sorry. Could you repeat the last part again?

Finance committee  Yes, you would. The reason is that what I've effectively proposed is to equalize the tax treatment between defined benefit plans and DC plans. In a defined benefit plan, whatever is required to fund the benefit is tax deductible. If the assets of the plan go down such that there'

Finance committee  I'm not sure how it could ever be advantageous to lose money in your RRSP.

Finance committee  Ultimately, even though you get the additional tax deduction, you're still going to be out of pocket more money--

Finance committee  They are down in respect of the tax deduction, but my point is that this is already happening for the fortunate people in defined benefit plans. But it's not available to the people in the DC plans and the RSPs. Those people in the DC plans and RSPs, which are most private sector

Finance committee  Okay.

Finance committee  I was formerly with a consulting firm analogous to the firm that Malcolm Hamilton belongs to. My speciality is in pension law and also in the area of pension tax law. I wrote a paper in 2008 that I published with the C.D. Howe Institute, which I will certainly make available to y

Finance committee  I think that's a legitimate question, because really, a voluntary CPP is a big RRSP in which everybody participates. Why is that better than participating in an RRSP on your own? Well, there might be a couple of reasons. First of all, if you're putting your money into a fund th

Finance committee  There's one thing I wanted to observe about the priority creditor status issue. I think we need to ask ourselves a question. Why is it that you have people from Nortel who are demonstrating in front of legislatures when they lose their pensions, but then you have a very large gro

Finance committee  Right, and the reason why I bring up this issue of the promise is that essentially I think what has really been going wrong with defined benefit pension plans in these situations you mention is that people have been told something that's not true, and they're upset about it. They

Finance committee  But it raises a question as to whether these plans were sustainable or that model was sustainable, or whether we need something more like a targeted benefit pension plan model, where there's an explicit understanding from the beginning that there's risk.

Finance committee  The CPP was higher. I understand the reason was that the CPP had very little exposure to asset-backed commercial paper. The QPP, or the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, had more exposure to that. The large government pension funds operate fairly cost-effectively and gene

Finance committee  Diversification is the issue and there are solutions for that. For example, you could take blocks of a supplementary CPP fund and farm them out to the private sector, so that if any one group of investment managers didn't do well, it wouldn't affect the entire fund. There are way

Finance committee  The reason it would be different is that there are two kinds of pension plans that are permitted under the Income Tax Act: defined benefit and defined contribution. Defined contribution works just like an RRSP. Defined benefits are more complex arrangements that allow you to fu

Finance committee  It's a historical restriction that dates back to the very beginning of pension saving when it started in 1917 under the Income Tax Act. At that time, you could only have employer contributions to a pension plan. That changed in 1946, I think it was, when employee contributions we