Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Duvall. I think when I talk about that and when I look at a three-year delay or some amount of time—I don't know if three years is the correct amount—there does have to be a reordering of the agreements between the borrowers and the lenders. That has to occur, wh

Industry committee  I think if you left it open-ended like that, it clearly would be a problem, but Laura and I have been talking about three years to get your house in order, which is a reasonable amount of time. If you took an alternate view, it would be some form of go-forward, as Mr. Poilievre m

Industry committee  Again, I have to point out that with Indalex in Ontario, pensions were essentially a deemed trust for almost two years, at least in the most recent legal case. Deemed trust comes first, and that would supersede every other priority in insolvency. That simply is not reasonable. Th

Industry committee  Yes, that's an option. Certainly, that would go a long way to fixing the problem we have today. No other country has the same legislative environment that Canada has. The countries you've heard of—the U.S., the U.K., Australia and most of the EU—do a better job of protecting pens

Industry committee  Yes, and pensions become another.... There is superpriority already in insolvency today—

Industry committee  —for things like that. This becomes another one. That would be a risk that would be evaluated as they make those loans, as they do today. Again, I would suggest that businesses would be much more careful about the pension deficits they build up, just as—

Industry committee  I would say it's an alternative. I think you'd have to be very careful with the implementation date, kind of like what we saw this week with Air Canada. If you let people know it's going to happen, I think you'll see a rush of loan applications to beat that deadline. We saw that

Industry committee  Yes. I think the answer to that is that if you assume that businesses make no change to their behaviour, then that's going to be a problem, absolutely. However, I see that as a false assumption. Businesses will adapt and adjust, just as they did when Ontario ruled in the Indalex