Smith doesn’t believe this lack of a detailed plan is a problem because her projected $334 billion payout - a fiction for all practical purposes - is so big that the fine print doesn’t matter. Proper feedback can’t be given because details of how a provincial pension plan would work - including whether it would be politically sheltered or not - haven’t been fleshed out yet. Instead of “Should we do this?” it asks “How should we do this?” Nevertheless, now begins the consultation phase, launched by Smith Thursday with the release of an engagement survey, carefully tailored to limit critical responses. Either the government has a weak understanding of the significance of a third-party report, or the advice being given to the premier is negligently bad. But in watching how Premier Danielle Smith talks about it, it might as well not be: “We’re going to go forward on the basis that we hired the best company, they did the work, and this is established in law,” she told CBC in an interview Thursday. To give itself a shade of plausible deniability, the Alberta government reassures us that this report is from an independent third party. Even this, he explained, was higher than what it would likely end up being in practice. The estimate also assumes that the feds won’t immediately change the CPP law the moment Alberta tries to pull an Ocean’s 11.Ī more realistic estimate comes from Trevor Tombe, a Calgary economist who projects that Alberta’s entitled share of CPP could be half as big as the government-stamped estimate at 25 per cent of the fund, equal to $150 billion. When its formula is applied to Ontario along with Alberta, the two provinces are owed an impossible 113 per cent of CPP. It uses an extremely generous, gluttonous even, interpretation of the law behind the CPP to arrive at its optimistic conclusion, which means it’s likely wrong. The colossal estimate for Alberta’s share was set out in an August report by a consulting firm tasked with envisioning how a provincial pension would work. The catch: Alberta’s plan to do this involves taking half of what’s in the CPP account - $334 billion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |