Back in January 2014 the CTF issued an open letter to Premier Wall urging pension reform. Recently, we received a reply from the Premier (click here to read.)

If you read our letter to the Premier, you will see we called on his government to pursue three major changes to defined-benefit pension plans which are still accepting new members (eg. judges, health care workers, some university plans, etc.):

1) Put all new employees in every part of government into less costly and less risky defined-contribution pension plans. 

2) Raise eligibility rates and reform benefits instead of asking taxpayers to put in more and more money into the old type of plans that cover many existing government employees. 

3) Push provincial government-funded organizations such as municipalities to pursue pension reform as well. 

As you can see, the Premier's response is fairly vague; one wouldn't expect major policy changes to be announced casually in a letter to an advocacy organization like ours. However, there are a couple signs of hope. Consider these quotes:

"Plan stakeholders are also being encouraged to amend their pension plan contracts to address the cost of benefits."

"In addition, stakeholders in certain publicly-funded pension plans are negotiating some changes to the benefit structure which will shift more pension plan funding responsibility to plan members. Government officials are working closely with the plan stakeholders to ensure new plan designs are affordable to taxpayers and sustainable for plan members."

The two quotes seem to suggest there will at least be a shifting of responsibility so that the taxpayer is on the hook for less of the cost and risk of these plans. That's a step in the right direction, but the devil is in the details.

More importantly, we need to see the government close off the remaining defined-benefit (the expensive and highly risky type) plans to new members. As noted in our open letter, Alan Blakeney's NDP government started to do just that back in the 1970s and early 1980s; now it's time for the Wall government to finish the job.

Such reform would certainly make things a lot fairer for taxpayers...people are getting tired of having to put more and more into government employee plans.

Time will tell if Premier Wall is truly on the side of taxpayers on this issue or not. Hopefully we'll see more news on this issue in next week's budget...