Premier Wynne acknowledges CPP reform will primarily benefit younger workers

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne says this week's agreement between most of the provinces and the federal government on pension reform is about benefiting "future generations" and younger workers now who don't have company retirement plans.

• Finance ministers reach agreement on expanding CPP
• CPP deal means Ontario scrapping pension plan proposal, Charles Sousa says
• CPP deal wouldn't exist if she hadn't been 'thorn' in side of other premiers, Wynne says

On Monday, Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the agreement to expand the Canada Pension Plan, although both Quebec and Manitoba have not signed on to the deal.

On Tuesday, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne took some credit for the new CPP deal, saying that it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't been a "thorn in the side" of other premiers on the need to improve retirement security. Since 2013, her government pushed for CPP reform, and started to move ahead with an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan when those calls went unheeded by the then Conservative federal government.

On Thursday, Wynne said although the plan will benefit younger workers compared to those nearing their retirement years, reform is sometimes about looking ahead.

"People my age, it's true, are not going to benefit from this decision. But that was never the point of it. The point was that 20 and 30 and 40 year olds right now can't afford to put aside enough money to make sure that they are going to have retirement security," Wynne told CBC's Metro Morning.

"And the fact that only 25 to 30 per cent of people have workplace pensions now, that was the problem that we were confronting."

One of government's jobs is to look ahead and "make decisions that will have an impact on future generations," she said.

"I think if we only think in four-year election cycles we do our society a huge, huge disservice."

CPP 'applies to everybody'

Under the amended plan, CPP will replace one-third of pre-retirement income, up from one quarter now, with the maximum annual benefit increasing to $17,478.

When the new plan comes into effect in 2019, the average Canadian worker making $55,000 will pay $7 more per month. By 2023, that will go up to $34 per month.

After the deal was announced, Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa said the governing provincial Liberals would scrap their plan to create an ORPP.

The ORPP would only have applied to workers in Ontario who did not have workplace pensions, and it would not have carried over if a worker moved out of the province, Sousa said Monday.

"The Canada Pension Plan applies to everybody," Sousa told CBC Toronto. "So that's more positive."  

MPP Julia Munro, the Progressive Conservatives' critic on the ORPP file, issued a statement Tuesday calling on the governing Liberals to release the full cost of starting to set up and then scrap the ORPP.

"The Premier recklessly pushed forward with her ORPP framework and the administrative body, the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan Administration Corporation (ORPP AC)," Munro said. "As a result, there are serious questions regarding the substantial unnecessary costs of the Wynne Liberals proceeding with the ORPP."

Wynne said Thursday that her government has ordered vendors and contractors to "stop their implementation work" on the ORPP. She added that the new deal means the government avoided the biggest associated cost of establishing the administrative body to oversee the plan.

She vowed to release the full cost to taxpayers when that information is available.

"The investment that we made in working to set up an ORPP has led to this national decision," Wynne said.

"So yes we'll put together the numbers and those will be public, but it was well worth the effort that we put in to setting up the ORPP, or beginning that."