Finance committee  I will be meeting him tomorrow.

Finance committee  The regulation of defined benefit plans has improved significantly over the last 20 or 30 years. In the past they were scarcely regulated at all. In most jurisdictions there is a detailed requirement that those assets be held separate from those of the company as a whole, and the

Finance committee  I think a number of countries have addressed this question, but we have to remember that only in very rare conditions do we have such major underfunding of companies' pension schemes as occurred after the global financial and economic crisis. As I said before, at that time there

Finance committee  Thank you very much. It is indeed 11 p.m., but I'm a night owl anyway, so I'm quite happy to stay up and talk to you. I think in terms of cost, many countries have been trying for a long time to bear down on the cost of offering private pensions. If you have mandatory private pe

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. As you said in the question quite rightly, all of these schemes that have been established have faced immediate problems. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in the U.S. was set up in the mid-1970s and was already in deficit a couple o

Finance committee  I think part of the problem we're facing in many countries is there is a shift away from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes. Canada has been a little behind the U.S. and the U.K. in that shift, but the shift is nevertheless going on. The problem is that we now have

Finance committee  I think I could recommend colleagues from OECD. I certainly have colleagues at OECD who are experts in this field, and I can forward their names to you.

Finance committee  Could I answer that question?

Finance committee  Thank you very much. I was asked by Mr. Ted Menzies, the parliamentary secretary to the treasury, to look at the Canadian pension system. It was a pleasure to come across a pension system that I would describe as high performing. There were a lot of very good things to say abou