Doctors Seek a Healthy Retirement

Hatcher, the senior general practitioner (GP) negotiator for the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association, said fee-for-service GPs in the province have put pensions near the top of their wish list as the association begins the newest round of master agreement talks with the provincial government. (The negotiations were supposed to have started at the beginning of the year, but then were pushed back, she said.)

The way Hatcher sees it, we’ve hit a tipping point. Self-employed doctors are fed up with having virtually no meaningful lifetime economic security. “It is not just in Newfoundland, it is going to happen across the country: Medical associations are going to be looking to governments and saying, ‘Guys, it’s happening in Europe, laws can be changed, things can be done differently. It is completely unfair that the self-employed have to suffer the vagaries of the market,’ ” especially when government employees receive guaranteed retirement incomes thanks to their pension plans, she said in an interview.

Hatcher’s own investments have sustained a further drop, following a 30% dive last fall. She estimated her investments are now 40% off their high. “It is pretty grim. I’m worth a huge amount less.”

Dr. Geoff Appleton, a Terrace, B.C., family physician and a former British Columbia Medical Association president, said association polls done as routine master-agreement preparations consistently find strong support for pensions among B.C. doctors.

“Very high on the list always comes pensions,” he said. B.C. physicians have an RRSP contribution matching arrangement with the province; however, the system is not indexed to inflation, does not hedge against the risk of outliving retirement savings, and it does not benefit from the economies of scale offered by pension funds.

Appleton continued, “You ask the average doctor, especially in the slightly older age group—they would really like to see a pension scheme and still be not looked upon as an employee of government.”

And just because a pension fund is co-sponsored by a government doesn’t necessarily make plan members government employees. Case in point: the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. While it receives sponsorship from the provincial government and the Ontario teacher’s union, “the board is required to act independently of . . . the sponsors,” explained plan spokeswoman Debra Hanna.

James Pierlot, a pension expert at management consulting firm Towers Perrin in Toronto, argued “it shouldn’t be necessary to create an artificial relationship between the physicians and the government to make pension saving possible.”

Dr. Mary Fernando, an Ottawa GP, has been advocating the way be cleared for doctors to have pensions for more than four years. In 2005, long before this recession, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) general council passed a motion she had tabled, spurring the CMA to lobby Ottawa for doctor pensions. Fernando has been critical of the CMA’s productivity on the dossier ever since.

In an interview, she told the Medical Post that now, more than ever, pensions are a necessary tool of physician lifetime financial security.