Finance committee  Yes. I think the way to answer the question is, first of all, to say that we know for certain now that the post-war period—the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—generally was a period of relatively high economic growth. There was some inflation, but it was eventually controll

Finance committee  My response would be that the question is becoming increasingly a moot point. Most corporations have already closed their defined benefit plans. They've already moved to a system oriented to individual pension accounts. No new DB plans are being opened by the corporate sector, s

Finance committee  There's a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and it basically explains behavioural economics. The example that starts out this book is a high school cafeteria, and what we're asked to imagine is how the diet of the kids would change depend

Finance committee  Right. If you look at the size of the funds in the CEM database, they go as small as $100 million and as large as $400 billion. We actually do see a very considerable size range. What you find over that range is that for every tenfold increase in size you get about a 20 basis poi

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

Finance committee  Right. I'd be happy to start. First of all, when you say “negative option billing”, it reminds me of Rogers.

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  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  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  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  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  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  I can hear you, yes.