Take a moment to contemplate these startling figures from the Globe & Mail's ongoing and admirable investigation of the state of the nation's pensions:
• 84% of public service workers have pensions.
• 78% of these plans are gold plated defined benefit pensions
• 25% of private sector workers have a pension plan
• 16% of these plans are gold plated defined benefit pensions
• 11 million workers, or 60 per cent, of Canada’s workers have no pension at all
• 8 million or 45 per cent, have no pensions or registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs)
That's right.
Eight million Canadian workers (45%) have no pensions or RRSPs; they will depend on the pitifully small handouts grudgingly provided by the Harper Tories, who have run up a huge deficit through their incompetence and untrustworthiness.
And eleven million workers (60%) have no pension at all.
Just hope that you don't grow old in the near future. With the structural deficits brought to you by our piano-playing and stock-picking (The recession is a good time to buy shares …) prime minister, your chances of living out your life as poor senior are high indeed, if you belong to these groups.
Of course, if you are a Tory Cabinet minister, you will probably not notice the monthly cheques from CPP…
Saturday, October 17, 2009
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8 comments:
So someone CHOOSES to work for a company with no pension plan then CHOOSES not to buy RRSP and it's the governments fault?
Yes. People without adequate pensions have a high chance of becoming a burden on society, and the taxpayers will have to foot the bill for their negligence. I expect our government to anticipate problems (something the Harper government had trouble doing with respect to the recession, despite all the warning signals), and to ensure that as many of them are prevented or mitigated.
So I expect our government to mandate that workers and employers provide adequately for their retirement years. Our governments (both parties) were asleep at the switch when the corporations greedily decided to dispense with adequate pensions.
Once again, we can learn a lot from the more democratically advanced European Union states.
Man do I agree cat. I bet we never hear this from the Liberal party though.
The public service is the burden on all of society.
As I stated in an earlier post the Libs should have a program outlined to allow tax free withdrawals of RRSP's well past age 71 for those who fall unde a certain income level.
For those with no pension plans a forced regime of saving for retirement would be an enelightened policy and in line with European Countries.
Well, I'll disagree somewhat. I don't trust businesses to last into my retirement, nor do a good job of managing pension funds (they could invest that in anything, right?). I don't trust government handing a mandate to employers, a mandate isn't the same as a legal club to beat one with.
I think the responsibility of ensuring adequate retirement money is shared by individuals and government.
I don't like tying retirement funds to employers any more than I like the American way of tying health insurance to employers. In both cases, it just makes it more complex and unnecessarily involves a 3rd party.
I agree with Terry 1@2:51am above. Individuals must be responsible for their own retirement, whether they work or not. If an individual chooses not to work, they're still responsible for savings or contributions. The funds themselves could be managed by regulated private enterprise in order to strike a balance between that enterprise abusing individuals vs. government abusing the funds for partisan political purposes.
Anon@6:43pm seems only to worry about the government, and neglects to mention any burden of private enterprise, which isn't new but has dramatically ramped up recently. I'm tired of hearing only 1 side of an argument, anon. I can't trust big business any more than you trust big government. And by big business, I specifically mean the unscrupulous-yet-still-legal kinds (just as I'm sure you don't hate big military while you hate big government).
So someone CHOOSES to work for a company with no pension plan then CHOOSES not to buy RRSP and it's the governments fault? Austin, some people have no choice on who they work for. They work in jobs that are available and unless its a big corporation or a government job, Forget it because working for a government job or big business means if you know the right people, you get the jobs whether or not your qualified for far more than who they eventually hire. Their resume keep sinking to the bottom of the piles. Don't say its not true because I personally know a lot of people who did and their qualification weren't adequate. I wasn't born yesterday and I have been around for a very long time and seen it happen over and over again..
To me, the key figure is that less than 10% of private sector employees have gold plated defined benefit pensions. And the solution, I think, is for governments to spread more broadly the benefits given to the public sector. Certain benefits should become universal, and not union terms. I'm not sure how this should be implemented (and it's a mix of federal and provincial responsibilities), but it could be something like this: increase CPP dramatically (with clawbacks), and add dental and other health benefits.
As our population ages, we have more voters with a stake in this. We need leadership. We can look to countries like France for inspiration.
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