Priority #3: Secure Pensions

The global recession starkly revealed many of the shortcomings inherent in Canada’s present patchwork system of public and private pensions. Too many retirees and pensioners – not least here in Windsor/Essex – found after a lifetime of playing by the rules that the abuses of a few crooked institutions in the financial sector could place at risk everything they’d worked for.

We’ve all heard, witnessed, or experienced such horror stories: good people ruined by the vagaries of the financial marketplace and the cold indifference of Tory Government.

New Democrats have proposed immediate, meaningful increases to the GIS and CPP, not the tinkering recently offered by Harper’s scandal-plagued Government in a desperate bid to change the channel on revelations of their nearly unprecedented ethical meltdown. Having just witnessed the greatest market failure in history, Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty’s solution to today’s crisis is to blindly commit the fragile pension income of Canadians to the same speculative marketplace which just so sensationally failed us. Imagine the sheer catastrophe which would have befallen Canadians if, in 2008, core social institutions like CPP had been deeply invested in the Wall Street implosion which drove the world to the very brink of a new depression?

My New Democratic colleagues and I have advanced practical, common-sense solutions like Bill C-501, which will legally prioritize existing pension obligations above those of creditors through corporate bankruptcies, and to establish a secure pension credit facility capable of backstopping private pension programs teetering on the brink of insolvency.

Seniors and pensioners deserve and rightly demand every confidence that the law will protect their hard-earned savings with the same vigour it does big investors, that a sustainable public system will be there to sustain them no matter what, and that their retirement will be defined by dignity, stability and security rather than the fear, uncertainty and poverty visited upon too many honest seniors in Stephen Harper’s Canada. I’m determined to work collaboratively with all parties, and all levels of Government, to ensure we defuse this ticking pension time bomb in the next session of Parliament.