Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, whose province wields much of the power in upcoming talks about how best to improve the Canada Pension Plan, says she won’t sign on to a national proposal if she thinks it’s too modest.
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Ontario wants the other provinces and Ottawa to agree to major improvement in Canada Pension Plan benefits in order to abandon plans for its own provincial pension, which is scheduled to start in January.
Russell says research shows the majority of Canadians are on track to meet their retirement savings goals through voluntary savings, pension plans and the federal retirement savings system.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau will meet with his provincial counterparts in Vancouver on Monday where a key agenda item will be expanding CPP, specifically increasing the benefits paid to the country’s retirees that would necessitate an increase in premiums paid by workers and employers.
Study author Frederick Vettese writes that CPP contributions should not be subject to any contribution reductions since the public plan is created to cover basic needs like food and shelter for middle-income workers after they retire.
“Far be it from me to come into another country and have an opinion, but I will say that because we are such close and important neighbours we are obviously interested in a stable, open United States government”, Wynne said in response to questions from Detroit media.
Updating the CPP requires approval of seven provinces with two-thirds of the population.
“It’s not enough just to have an insignificant change”.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne weighed in on American politics Wednesday, saying the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency made her feel “anxious”.
At a news conference in Burnaby, B.C., Premier Christy Clark said the message Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered to her Thursday was that the federal government doesn’t want to harm those regions where the economy is struggling.
“We’ve said if we can get to, sort of, two-thirds of the value of what we have – what we’ve worked up with the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, that’s one of the metrics that we would look at for a CPP enhancement”, she said in Windsor, where she announced funding for the auto sector.
Wynne has said her government will implement the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan starting next January in the absence of any agreement on CPP expansion.
“We’re not willing to wait another five or 10 years to do this”, she said.
“I’m more encouraged now than I’ve ever been in the discussions that we’re having”, he said.
The study comes amid a flurry of debate about the CPP.
For the last six months, provincial and federal officials have reviewed and analyzed potential changes to the federal plan, to see what is palatable in terms of an increase in benefits, an increase in premiums and where to set the bar on the income cut-off for paying CPP premiums. Critics of the status quo argue that even for those who make the maximum contributions every year, the maximum CPP benefit is just $13,110, a figure that is regularly adjusted for inflation.
IIAC’s favoured approach to reforming the retirement income system would include a modest, targeted expansion of the CPP, which would supplement the pension savings of modest-income Canadians across the country.
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The Ontario scheme is supposed to launch in 2018 with workers at companies with 500 employees or more that do not have pension plans contributing 0.8 per cent of their pay to the ORPP.
