I don’t believe many pension administrators routinely read the Canada Revenue Agency’s quarterly publication, Excise and GST/HST News. Notification of edition No. 93 hit my inbox earlier this week. Not expecting much news around my practice area of GST/HST for pension and employee benefits plan, my job dropped to read the news that the Department of Finance has published draft amendments to the Excise Tax Act (ETA) proposing that PRPPs will be subject to the same GST/HST rules as registered pension plans (RPPs).
While attending last week’s Pension Policy Forum in Toronto, it became clear that the focus of pension reform in this country has gradually been shifting.
Nova Scotians will soon have a new option to save for their retirement.
Ontario small business owners are feeling vulnerable to the introduction of the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan.
A few years back, we held a session at the annual Avantages Montreal DC conference and asked the sponsor audience how likely they would get involved in helping DC members optimize their retirement income, post-accumulation. Sadly, only two out of the 50 or so sponsors present said they would. But it looks like things are changing.
The Government of Ontario has reintroduced its budget that includes the proposed Ontario Retirement Pension Plan.
Eighty-five percent of small business owners in Quebec support the concept of the new voluntary retirement savings plan, according to a survey.
After a number of false starts (and there may be more yet), the goal of pension reform in Canada seems to have zeroed in on helping middle-income Canadians maintain their standard of living into retirement.
A little over two years ago, Daniel Kahneman wrote a seminal book on human behaviour and perceptions, titled Thinking, Fast and Slow. In the book, Kahneman makes the following observation, “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” I would submit that this phenomenon is the basis for the widespread belief that Canada is suffering a national retirement crisis. The frequent repetition in the media that Canadians are not preparing themselves adequately for retirement certainly has to colour our thinking on the matter.
The Saskatchewan Pension Plan (SPP) has been called “Canada’s best-kept secret” and a “made-in-Saskatchewan success story,” with the potential to do for pension reform what medicare did for healthcare in the country. SPP general manager Katherine Strutt refers to it as “an overnight sensation that only took 28 years.”