Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  I understand the guarantee fund notion, but if you look at the track record of Ontario's Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund, which pales in comparison with what the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has seen in the United States, I understand that the guarantee fund in Ontario cu

Finance committee  One of the big issues is funding of defined benefit plans where the employer has all the downside risk and doesn't necessarily share in any of the upside gain. So there are recommendations out there to try to incent better funding of pension plans. Today employers put in what th

Finance committee  First of all, we don't provide pension plans. There may be some bodies out there, like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, for example, who might like to provide a pension plan for their members. But again, under current tax and provincial pension rules, they cannot.

Finance committee  I'd like to think that people will get their promised benefits, and we need to probably find ways to fix the system so we incent better funding. Mr. Pacetti asked earlier why public plans aren't having trouble like the private plans are. Part of the reason is that public plans ar

Finance committee  No, I don't think it's stupid management at all. I think there are some problems with the system of funding defined benefit plans. But let me throw out another idea. There was a lot of talk in both the Ontario and the Alberta-B.C. provincial expert reports on the notion of some

Finance committee  It would operate very much like a defined-contribution plan operates today, whereby you have your own account. So you're pooling the assets for investment purposes, but not for other purposes, such as pooling risks of longevity and that sort of thing. It may be a way to engage

Finance committee  You're changing the onus to the Canadian who's investing in their retirement. They should be creating some wealth towards their retirement, and you're forcing them to keep their eye on the ball, if you will, rather than simply putting money into a pension plan, perhaps not lookin

Finance committee  It could, but it doesn't have to. Most defined contribution plans that employers provide today would have an employer component, but part of the thinking behind expanding coverage is that for small business owners, for example, who simply can't afford to provide a pension plan or

Finance committee  As I mentioned earlier, we already have a public pension program in Canada and it's known as the CPP and the QPP. That's doing what it was intended to do, which is to provide a basic level of retirement income to Canadians. On top of that, we have the other government support pro

Finance committee  Probably many of them. It's low interest rates. We all love low interest rates, but low interest rates, at the historical lows that they're at, are actually used for valuing the solvency basis of all these pension plans. That's why the federal government and many of the provincia

Finance committee  No, I think there are some real structural changes here that need to be made, but part of it is the economic--

Finance committee  That's correct. It's through our membership, who are primarily individuals who work for plan sponsors or plan administrators. So we're looking at the size of their pension plans.

Finance committee  Let's talk about expanding the existing CPP as we know it. We have no concerns about the fact that the CPP, over 12 years ago, was put on a solid foundation, actuarially. We're now paying close to 10%, between Canadians and their employers, into that plan. The chief actuary has i

Finance committee  Our only concern or objection, if you want to call it that, to a supplemental CPP is that it could become the only game in town, and we're opposed to—