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Results: 46 - 60 of 656
View Ali Ehsassi Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Ali Ehsassi Profile
2021-06-03 11:41
Mr. Zigler, we have heard from Mr. Thornton. He has put something on the table, if you will.
What would your reaction be to the suggestions that Mr. Thornton presented today?
Mark Zigler
View Mark Zigler Profile
Mark Zigler
2021-06-03 11:41
I believe, frankly, that they are not cognizant of what we have in this country.
Pension plans are already very strictly regulated. Valuations can be required more often than every three years if there are problems. We have pension regulators in this country in all provinces that try to make sure that pension plans are properly funded. What Mr. Thornton suggests is already being done.
The problem with insolvency is that a tsunami hits. Interest rates go crazy. Companies go out of business because their sales drop and their workforces drop. People live longer than the actuaries predicted. You will have a bankruptcy. There's no fixing this by looking in the rear-view mirror. You have to deal with the problem when the bankruptcy occurs.
Pension regulators already try to fix it. The solution Mr. Thornton has given you is a non-solution. At least Mr. Docherty mentioned a guarantee fund. That is a solution. Quarterly evaluations make no sense. It costs a fortune to have an actuary value a pension plan. They get done annually in many pension plans because the regulators order that. That's their job. That's a provincial responsibility. That's not something for this committee to do. This committee has to protect people once the bankruptcy occurs.
View Ali Ehsassi Profile
Lib. (ON)
Cody Cooper
View Cody Cooper Profile
Cody Cooper
2021-06-03 11:42
I would tend to agree with a lot of it, but I also share Mr. Zigler's focus that this is why we're here. It's what happens when the shit hits the fan. Pardon me.
On the same point, the three people in the middle of my screen are also not telling you that every province basically is heading towards an 85% solvency level, which means that you're capped at 15% loss going in and you're still covering all the laws. Ontario did not increase its $1,500 payment at all, even though it should be almost $3,000 now, given inflation from when it started.
All of this arguing about the solutions has been going on for decades, but no one has ever implemented them, and when they go to the other forums they say that instead of 100% , we should have 85%, which is now basically the norm. I'm tired of hearing it from both sides of the mouth.
Michael Powell
View Michael Powell Profile
Michael Powell
2021-06-01 11:07
Good morning.
My name is Mike Powell. I am the president of the Canadian Federation of Pensioners.
CFP's 23 member organizations advocate directly for over 300,000 defined benefit pensioners, and our allies represent millions more. We support Bill C-253 and the extension of superpriority to pension deficits. This is the simplest solution to meaningfully improve pension protection for Canadian seniors.
In our Canadian regulatory environment, the only single place to protect pensions is within insolvency regulations. This committee and Parliament face a decision between the status quo—which leaves seniors' future financial well-being at risk and perpetuates an unfair system designed to exclude seniors from protecting their own financial interests, an unfair system that has been proven to significantly harm older Canadians—and a new future that offers protection to vulnerable seniors.
I'd like to address five concerns that stakeholders in insolvency may raise.
The first is that lending rates would increase for companies with defined-benefit plans, leading to more insolvencies. This argument was central in 2010 when a similar bill, Bill C-501, was debated. In 2011, though, the pension deficit was ruled a deemed trust by the Court of Appeal for Ontario in the Indalex case. A deemed trust is the highest priority in insolvency, above the superpriority envisioned in Bill C-253. This ruling stood for two years before it was overturned.
It is critical to note that there was no fallout from this decision. The wave of insolvencies of companies with DB plans that was predicted did not occur. Borrowers and lenders made accommodations, and business continued.
The second is that there would be fewer restructurings and more liquidations. This is also an old and flawed argument that would get a failing grade in a first-year business policy course. Envision submitting a paper whose key assumption of your argument was, “Given a significant change in a regulatory environment, business management would not change their critical strategic decisions; therefore, I will use past results without adjustment in my future model.” Along with a failing grade, there would likely be a comment that basing your argument on inept company management is not recommended in policy development.
The third concern is that this would discourage new DB plans and lead companies to close existing plans. The harsh reality is that DB plans have been on the decline for many years, despite actions taken by governments to reduce costs for companies.
The fourth is that other creditors would be disadvantaged. This is based on the false notion that stakeholders are treated equally today. The impact of insolvency is much greater on pensioners than on other creditors. Pensioners lose a significant portion of their income for the rest of their lives; other stakeholders only lose a portion of the money owed them at the time of insolvency, not their entire contract, nor do they face future reductions in revenue due to the insolvency of one of their customers.
There's also a difference of control. The other stakeholders at the insolvency table have all negotiated their financial exposure. They've made conscious decisions to address payment terms, prices, interest rates and contract conditions. Government treats seniors as wards of the state. Pensioners have no ability to control, approve or even influence their financial risk in insolvency. Pensioners are not even ensured a seat at the insolvency table.
The fifth is that changes made in the 2019 budget have levelled the playing field. Pension protection in 2019 is the proverbial bailing of the Titanic with a teacup. You can measure progress, but it won't change the outcome. We need to ask this: Would the changes in budget 2019 have protected the Sears pensioners? The answer is no.
In summary, government has appointed itself as sole guardian of the vulnerable seniors' future financial well-being. Government legislation precludes pensioners from any form of control or even influence over their pensions in insolvency. Bill C-253 addresses this imbalance.
This committee and Parliament are faced with a decision. You know of the real price paid by seniors left in collateral damage in an insolvency. This is fact. You will hear concerns raised by other stakeholders of theoretical harms. This is speculation. The choice is yours to make. Our 300,000 members strongly urge you to stop treating pensions as piggy banks in insolvency and support Bill C-253.
Thank you.
View Scott Duvall Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you.
One of the things that Mr. Yussuff said—and I feel it's outrageous that this could actually happen—is that when Sears paid $500 million to dividends in 2013, they still had a $313-million pension deficit. How can we prevent companies from doing this in the future? They're the ones that plan going into CCAA. How do we stop this paying of dividends when there is a huge debt in the pension fund?
Maybe Mr. Lemieux wants to answer.
Dominic Lemieux
View Dominic Lemieux Profile
Dominic Lemieux
2021-06-01 12:24
This amounts to taking money out of our pensioners' pockets and redistributing it to shareholders, who are well off, for the most part.
I would come back to my initial proposal. First, Bill C‑253 has to be passed. In addition, the provinces have to ensure that pension funds are 100% funded. It is indecent for a company to give money to its shareholders when it is not paying its contribution to the pension fund. That is the same thing as me, as a head of household who is about to retire, being in debt and my credit cards being maxed out, but deciding to head south for two weeks. It would make no sense to leave my children like that, in a vulnerable position. Well, that is exactly what we allow, in Canada: taking money from pensioners' pockets, from the most vulnerable people, and distributing it to company shareholders.
Melanie Sonnenberg
View Melanie Sonnenberg Profile
Melanie Sonnenberg
2021-05-31 16:21
Thank you, Mr. Johns.
The threshold, when corporations come to purchase fish plants and access and so on, it's a high bar. For our country I believe the number is $480 million. That catches the attention of Industry Canada. It's in that range, and a corporation coming in at $1.2 million catches their attention.
Sometimes what happens in coastal communities, and perhaps if Mr. Mallet might have been able to be on.... We've seen in New Brunswick where smaller plants are being, I won't say gobbled up, but being purchased. This is being done in a very systematic way so at the end of the day we now have a conglomeration owned by one entity, which perhaps, if they continue on, could make the threshold.
These things are concerning. It's not making the radar and that is a problem in itself. On the west coast—and you know this probably better than I—there is a lot of foreign ownership and it's not clearly understood. The committee raised it in the report in 2019, I believe, as a recommendation to have some public registry. We need to understand who is owning our resource on the west coast and we continue to advocate for that recommendation, and again, it's a public resource for [Technical difficulty—Editor] the country [Technical difficulty—Editor] I can compare to elsewhere.
I'm breaking up.
Andy Olson
View Andy Olson Profile
Andy Olson
2021-05-26 17:36
Good afternoon, committee members and Chair.
Thanks for having us to speak about this issue today. My name is Andrew Olson, and I am the executive director of the Native Fishing Association. We're an aboriginal financial institution based in West Vancouver that serves aboriginal indigenous fishers all over B.C. through loans, licences and other business assistance, as we can.
Previously, before I took my job at the Native Fishing Association, I worked for the Tseshaht First Nation in Port Alberni as a fisheries manager and fish biologist for 10 years. In that role, I served as a first nations representative on the prawn advisory board for many years and worked with the prawn advisory board and prawn advisory committee, which is what it was before it became the prawn advisory board. I participated in many of those discussions and much of that work, and I never heard of undersized prawns being an issue. This is an issue that to me points to some of the other concerns in the Pacific region, in that DFO is being manipulated and used by business, industry in particular.
When they talk about industry, they talk about the PPFA. They are not the industry. That is the commercial processor group of representatives, not the representatives of the independent commercial fishers, who are represented by the Prawn Industry Caucus. That's one thing we need to be clear about. When they're talking about industry, they're referring to the Pacific Prawn Fishermen's Association. Those are two different groups with different participants, and in many instances, that larger organization represents the processing companies that are taking live prawns and shipping them to Asia for a lucrative market.
This shift for fishers wasn't just into tailing and tubbing prawns. It's been a shift to live prawn sales at the dock, which has turned the market around for these guys. Their opportunity to fish.... Even with a strong foreign market to ship the seafood to, the fishers were not getting the benefit of that strong foreign market price. The fishers haven't been making a high living off of that market and then having to shift to a lesser market domestically. The domestic market has proven to be able to bear the prices that are potentially higher than what the international market is providing to the fishers, so it's not just a temporary shift. I think it's a long-term shift.
One of the things I heard in the earlier panel discussion was a lot about sustainability and size issues and those kinds of things. It's clear that the committee understands all of those things and is trying to understand what's at the root of this issue and how we can work to support fishers to make a living and to protect the resource—which I think we all think is important—so that they can keep fishing.
We know that the size of the prawns is more of a marketability issue than it is a conservation issue and that there is not a sustainability concern in harvesting undersized prawns, because they're all males. Knowing that, we start to look at what's behind all this stuff, and that's what concerns me the most. We've seen processes and even enforcement programs manipulated by large shareholder corporations again and again in the Pacific region, many of them foreign-owned. They use their levers and the people they have influence with to change policy and change the way that the fisheries are managed through enforcement action, causing things to essentially shift immediately.
They realized they were going to lose access to all these prawns because fishermen saw that they could sell the prawns domestically and make more money selling prawns to their neighbours and friends than selling prawns to a commercial fish plant that is going to pack them into a box and send them to China. All of a sudden, when fish companies started to see that they were going to lose access to a product that was making them millions of dollars when they sent it overseas, they had to do something.
That's my concern. It's that this change points to that kind of thing and that kind of corruption in the Pacific region. We need to get to the bottom of this and we need to make sure that the fishermen have an opportunity to make a living. That's critically important.
Andy Olson
View Andy Olson Profile
Andy Olson
2021-05-26 17:59
Yes. I think that plays a significant part in the challenges.
Fishing companies are the ones calling people to lease licences. It's often not fishermen. The goal is to control as much access to product as possible. Their interest is not in supporting fishermen.
View Ed Fast Profile
CPC (BC)
View Ed Fast Profile
2021-05-17 11:17
Ms. O'Brien, can you clarify the definition of “large businesses”? Those are ones that have authorized credit of more than $1 million, more than 500 employees, and annual revenues of more than $50 million. Is that correct?
Erin O'Brien
View Erin O'Brien Profile
Erin O'Brien
2021-05-17 11:17
That's correct. That's the definition that currently exists in the Bank Act.
View Brenda Shanahan Profile
Lib. (QC)
You do mention the requirements and the difference between corporations and organizations. I believe that is in your recommendation 3, and that's what my colleague, Ms. Lattanzio, was curious about.
Can you talk about what your thinking is there?
Nancy Bélanger
View Nancy Bélanger Profile
Nancy Bélanger
2021-05-14 14:58
Recommendation 3 is making the requirements the same, I believe.
Results: 46 - 60 of 656 | Page: 4 of 44

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