Pensions: Canada: Many private add-ons to Canada Pension Plan were invested by employers and union-controlled funds in meltdown companies

In an article from CanWest News Service via National Post, Norma Greenaway lines up the Fed Canada govt -- "Feds preach patience on pension reform" (Aug9,2k9) -- against Susan Eng speaking for Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) and a dozen or so other interests braying at the top of their voices for reckless speed:

She and other critics contend the retirement landscape in Canada is a disaster, given that three out of four people in the private sector have no pension at all, and that many existing plans are facing shortfalls.

The premiers turned up the volume on the subject last week, rallying around Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s recent calls for a national pension summit.

Activists in British Columbia and Alberta are urging the provinces to introduce government -sponsored supplemental pension plans if the federal-provincial working group doesn’t yield timely change on the national front.

In the meantime, the Feds' "point man" has "stood pat," insisting that everyone affected must be consulted so as not to create huge new problems, leave some financially-disastered persons out of a hasty new formula. That's how Ted Menzies (Conserv, Alberta) sees the matter of legislative reckfull speed:

The minority Conservative federal government is, however, promising to act this fall to protect the value of federally regulated private pension plans. Those account for about seven per cent of the plans in Canada, while all others fall under provincial regulation.

Menzies said federal regulations would be rewritten to guarantee workers get 100 per cent of their pension in cases of insolvency.

“Right now, companies can voluntarily wind up a pension and basically just walk away, and pensioners don’t get what they are promised, and that’s wrong,” Menzies said.

One can see the reason for the panic to hasten some (probably poorly written) new law.

There is, of course, a political expedient pushing the full-speed-ahead crowd, even if they know the govt is being prudent and judicious, stating its aim to underwrite the loss of any pensioners who lost, for instance, their entire retirement funds when private-pension insurance companies in Canada hemorhaged in the recent (and continuing?) severe USA-originated recession ("meltdown") that only now are we hoping to emerge from. It's important for politicians not in govt but in opposition on the Fed level, important also for provincial Prime Ministers to "get out in front on the issue", and important for CARP to try to define the issues and get out further in front of both provs and Feds. That's politics, and it's not economically sound thinking when in this political cycle we want to ensure a restorative justice by way of a well-consulted and well-written law for safeguarding both the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the private pensions of persons who paid perhaps thru their employers to insurance plans that have bellied-up along with the companies who seemed sound until the disaster hit.

One part of that disaster, is to be noted in the fact that many of the people who lost the add-on funds they had been paying for (paying a long time for many) had their funds invested in essentially non-pension companies perhaps driven by ventures-capital unit, resulting in corporate squandering and abusing the pension funds in question, like that of the teachers union in some juridictions. Govt regulation for many decades has been in seriously short supply. No one figured-in the swamping of the Canadian boat, when the USA economic boat exploded. Remember, please, that the US insurance industry with all those pension funds to invest (like Canada's), included the giant rat corporation American Insurance Companies, Inc. (the infamous AIG), which got all that stimulus money -- then went on to play hanky panky to slop huge annual bonuses on teams of failed executives, just to have them stay put on the job for another round in the infested corporation. This is the source of the tidal wave that swamped Canada's insurance companies, swamped pension funds that had been invested in the accounts of the insurers' corps and unions, and swamped the bedevilled retirees or prospective retirees.

Okay, you've got the slant spelled out above. For another and rather partisan view, but one that deserves careful consideration by Canadians, a viewpoint from National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), which you can read on their website posted Aug22,2k9, under the title, "Summer Fiction: Conservatives working on pensions" by Larry Brown, Secretary-Treasurer, NUPGE.

Another valuable source is the Canadian leftwing-Christian org, Citizens for Public Justice, now resident in Ottawa. On CPJ-Canada's website amidst a discussion on "Employment Insurance watch: Is unemployment a choice?", by Chandra Pasma (Aug5,2k9), I encountered a Christian political leader's creative thawt processes on her topic. The writer brings up our focal theme in this blog entry: pensions, only briefly but significantly, and the very word "pensions" is well-positioned in the syntactics of her set of reasons attributed to the counterparts on the other side of the argument as to "whether the generosity of unemployment insurance benefits creates unemployment." (With Pasma, I woud agree that this proposition is not true.) Pasma (whose official position and task is CPJ's Social Justice Policy Analyst) says:

Fourth, this argument assumes that people have no plan for their lives beyond the next 50 weeks of employment benefits. Either that, or it assumes that unemployment has no impact on pensions, benefits, promotions or pay increases at work. Neither assumption is very realistic.

The writer's positive thesis is that: unemployment, regretably, sadly, has definite impact on pensions, benefits, promotions or pay increases at work. Somehow this means Unemployment Insurance is iniquitous--meaning here, it's inadequate for "average working person" (AWP).

(We used to speak -- without the word "average" -- of a "working stiff"; but today this language woud be considered offensive, I guess, because its gender specificity woud be targetted by our modern "cultural sensors", and perhaps r+tly so. Two days later--or is it three--I was asking myself why I had earlier written the preceding sentence, when the phrase I remembered that in my generation's speak was the phrase "working stiff"--a stiff, a corpse--the working corpse, as in "He's a working stiff" meaning a working corpse, AWP, Average Working Person in Pasma's abstractive terminology and conceptualization).

A problem for me was how this very informative article swings on the concept of "average working person." Not that alone either: the writer turns a multi-facetted cloud of attitude that does exist among many blue-collar workers into an "argument," and then turns her counterparts' view/s into an either/or, typical of reductionist binomial logic in the political and other social sciences. For instance, there seems to be here no recognition that the counter-culture (hippies, feminists, neo-marxists, and otherwise assorteds) included many slicksters who became professional at "living off the land" (govt welfare, grants, etc.). But also, part-time jobs (I had a musician friend who worked PT in the cafeteria on the first floor of Rochdale College on College Street). He woud bring to his house of many tenants huge containers of fresh good vegetarian food, that otherwise woud spoil. Bill Keeft, he was a fabulous young musician, whose life ended with a skid of his motorcycle on a sandy patch covering the roadway.

As the formidable slickstering of the system became more refined, some of its energy went into life plans to "beat the system," as we used to say, "from below." This was a skill set on manipulating "pogey" periods, part-time work (paid under the table when possible), or full-time work to establish qualifications for another round of Pogey, Unemployment Insurance, UI). The existence of the zero-work subculture, first in the counter-culture and then among often-h+ly educated drugculture denizens and neo-neo-Marxist theoreticians, it became the stratum known specifically and accurately as "welfare cheats." They were not "independent," they belonged to a culture and were solidarized by people of the same values but who did not live the lifestyle full time, some of whom had early found careers they liked and incomes, some even promotions; but also the counter-culture dwellers were supported by an identity, true or false or both at the same time, feedback looped back to them: a picture of themselves in the first "youth culture" that emerged following the American crossover days that gave birth to Elvis. It's a big step from him to Janice, or Jimmi.

That's why the previous Premier of Ontario, Harris (sorry, can't remember this famous Conserv's first name) reversed previous NDP and Liberal regimes' tolerance for clever folks sucking up funds that shoud have gone to the disabled, those who coudnt work. Of course, some of the slicksters were quite genuinely disabled themselves, very often these folks needed medical assistance but went undiagnosed by the then-MedicalSystem in Ontario. The sociology of knowledge in healing here works slowly thru the medical bureaucracy before it seeps down to your family doctor.

Neither does Ms. Pasma seem to realize the vital differences in belonging to the United Steelworkers or the Boilermakers International Brotherhood, as against belonging to the Christian Labour Association of Canada. The differences have pension implications, as well. What are the similarities?

Taking the Boilermakers as an example, a union member in good standing woud get a call from the union hall that a job was available, the job estimated as lasting a certain number of weeks or months. You coud turn down the job offer, because your previous earnings allowed you to take time off to build a cabin on your new lakeside property bawt with some of your previously saved earnings. Or, you coud take the specific job-offer from your union, perhaps because your pogey was almost timed-out and the job offer included free motel accomodations and a per diem for expenses, as well as travel allowance, say from Toronto to Ottawa and reverso. You tried to come back home to the family on the weekends, but that kind of weekend was rare, as it was an intense small crew of master blowtorchers that basically worked day and nite. Grabbing "a bite to eat" and then sleeping. Then another long shift. The pay was astronomical, from my reference point. The Weberian-type "average working person" is at best a theoretic-statisical construct that rubs out the particularities exfloriated/ing in the system and the myriads of ways in which individuals bawt the new workview over subsequent decades, and attained a set of skills to manipulate the welfare system and the grants system in various disciplines.

Back to Ontario Premier Harris' days (I remember, it's Mike Harris, arch r+twing conservative): He did not improve the welfare system; he did catch a good many of the welfare cheats and that (considered in itself and out of context) improved the system somewhat; but he also sunk his hatchet into the fragile lives of many welfare recipients who didn't necessarily know how crazy they were (I was) and why! What is "average" for the depressed person, the working person, and the overlap category of the depressed working person?, I ask rhetorically. But study after study tells us most people are "happy at work" or "enjoy my job" or some such simple question-answering in social-science surveys and polls. At the same time, we are different personality-types, from the constitutionally-depressed person (chronic depressive) to the constitutionally-flow personality of the congenital optimist.

Pasma has the gist of some of that history in Ontario; but she's had to further her scope far beyond my own merely Toronto, Ontario experience. So, some of the generalities she puts forward are good info for me to think about in interpreting my own experience, much of it in Toronto and therefore Ontario, but decidedly interpreting it/me from the centre of having lived it. The writer does have an overview and that's quite helpful these days.

Returning to the narrative I almost abandoned, my boilermaker friend is part of Canada's blue-collar aristocracy. His trade controls the number of skilled workers available on the big-money big-projects; and when he had saved up enuff money for his next personal goal (he's very achievement oriented, as they say), he'd stop working, he'd had enuff for the meanwhyld, and his name woud then go to the bottom of his union's call list. Then his Pogey woud begin; he woud get big-time from Pogey because of the demand for this kind of specialized skilled labour on massive industrial and nuclear-power facilities.

The East Coast fishery and canning workers used to have another "special relation" with Pogey. Their UI payments were distributed month by month each year, up to the date the commercial fishing season began, as I recall. And when the season ended, the workers started receiving Pogey soon enuff after the season's end.

So, talking about "average working person" doesn't fit the actual UI history of Canada, which varied from industry to industry and union to union, region to region (as does/did the Ontario provincial Employment Standards Act with its trade-by-trade variations from the basic standards). These differentiations are the key to understanding Canada's Unemployment Insurance; UI was never designed to equalize anything. It was a way to protect large industries that were vulnerable to loss of sufficient labor supply in a specific region or Canadawide. "Labour supply" -- that is, workers.

Of course, we dont want to reduce the richness and variability of the living experience of UI in Canada (until recently, at least), no reduction to a statistical abstraction -- therefore necessarily an abstraction that hopefully is based on a sound theoretics of social-science research and statistical methods. But let's not miss the human reality in the historiography of manipulating UI and Welfare rules to "get by" in a green-approved "living simpler" life-style. Some felt morally superiour because they woud thus "leave a l+ter footprint on the planet."

Remember the communes? Not the dreamlike idealisms--but nitty-gritty personal-politics power trips, especially when some of the women posed Feminists' issues that were fawt over in the course of the day, the week, the months of communal life. How jobs were distributed within the commune. How income was risk-managed (they didn't use the word then) by the commune. How sexual liaisons were bartered for other considerations in the commune.

Also, there were others who lived a neo-Marxist activist lifestyle; usually these were young people from decidedly middleclass backgrounds. Some combined the two. I knew reformational Christians who lived in contact with hundreds of this mix of humanity in Toronto. Pasma potvaliantly passes by what many historians regard as the key phenomena of those times--which have legitimized a view of Pogey and pragmatic relations with govt and its bureaucracies that has become a current of the mainstream of Canadians attitudes, a reality that is not well-conscientized in a refutation of alleged "arguments."

All the foregoing aside, Pasma's fine article is h+ly recommended.

-- Albert Gedraitis, publisher


-- EconoMix