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| Ontario Tories Give Their Corporate Friends a Free Hand On Pension Surpluses By Louis Erlichman Canadian Research Director |
On October 30, as Ontario Finance Minister Janet Ecker was making public pronouncements about a package of measures to “protect public confidence”, she was quietly slipping a big Halloween treat to the Eves’ government’s corporate backers, in the form of changes to the surplus provisions of the Ontario Pension Benefits Act. These measures, buried in the omnibus budget bill, would give employers a free hand to remove surplus from Ontario pension plans, reversing the rights of plan members, won largely through Court decisions, and destroying a system of surplus-sharing which has worked effectively for the last decade. Contrary to the promise in the June budget of consultations with stakeholders, these legislative changes were slipped into the legislation with no notice to unions, and with the clear intention of pushing them into law before the end of the year. It is particularly frightening that the government is opening up employer access to contribution holidays and pension fund “surpluses” at a time when the stock market meltdown has put many pension funds in a precarious financial state – putting many pensions and pensioners at risk. The last thing we need to do is give those ever-reliable corporate CEOs a freer hand to dip into pension funds. The Tory legislation is clearly intended to take away the limited rights won by plan members to a share of pension surpluses. It explicitly makes the decision of the regulator (which they will direct, by regulation, to the corporation’s benefit) override any other legislation or legal principle and even takes away the right of appeal of the regulator’s decisions to the courts. In a particularly heavy-handed move, the bill retroactively takes away the rights of members to claim any part of surpluses from partial plan wind-ups (the so-called Monsanto issue) going back to 1988, even when objections have been filed and the case is currently pending. The legislation certainly does protect public confidence. We can remain confident that the Eves government will do whatever their greedy corporate backers tell them. |
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