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Looked for the Cows and found St. Mary’s: My great-great-uncle, Robert Stapleton of Nissouri reminiscences, The St. Mary’s Journal Argus, June 23, 1938

Guest Publications

Peter Hicks –The exaggerated impact of the Boomer generation: It is finally time to move on . January 2025

Peter Hicks is a social policy consultant with long experience at senior levels in the social departments and central agencies of the Government of Canada and at the OECD in Paris. He is a member of the Income Security Panel of the Council on Aging of Ottawa.

Reports

Government of Canada, Report of the Task Force on Pension Reform, March 1, 1983

Pension policy in Canada from the late 1970s to the early 1980s was often referred to as the period of “the Great Pension Debate”. The genesis of the debate included major concerns about the lack of inflation protection in many defined benefit pension plans, and the appearance of a third major player. Until that time, there were two major poles in the struggles over pension reforms: labour and business. They were joined by leaders in the women’s movement who were arguing for a homemaker pension to recognize the substantial value of unpaid work in the home, primarily by women.

The federal government released the voluminous government officials’ report of the Task Force on Retirement Income Policy (the “Lazar” report) in 1979. There were also reports commissioned by several provinces and one from the (long defunct) Economic Council of Canada. In an effort to find consensus, the federal government produced the “Green Paper on Pension Reform” in 1982, which was then referred in 1983 to a Special Parliamentary Task Force on Pension Reform, chaired by MP Douglas Frith. The intent was to seek an all-party consensus, and the final recommendations of the report were virtually unanimous.

The process of developing this “Frith Report” was also notable. Given the many technical complexities involved in pension policy and the issues of the day, the Task Force’s research staff, led by Prof. Rod Dobell and including myself, persuaded the MPs on the task force, before embarking on gathering evidence, to permit the research staff to provide an extensive series of in camera briefings, in effect a crash course in pension plan history, structures, issues, and arithmetic. At the outset, there were a number of opposing partisan views among the MPs. But the Task Force members, with the support of their own party researchers, came to trust the research staff. There was, as a result, a generally collegial working relationship among the MPs, the party researchers, and ourselves as the central research staff. Indeed, once the MPs had finished their questions of various witnesses providing evidence, the Chairman, Doug Frith, would often turn to me for any further questions of the witnesses.

In the end, the Task Force rejected the idea of homemaker pensions. They did recommend harmonization of the maximum contribution limits for RRSPs and workplace pension plans (RPPs) (a recommendation by the Carter Royal Commission on Taxation in 1965), but at substantially lower levels than in fact emerged subsequently, and using a tax credit rather than a tax deduction. This was in line with the Task Force members’ views that this major tax incentive should be better targeted, focusing on the middle class. With regard to inflation protection, the Task Force recommended a minimum mandatory amount of indexing of pensions in pay, based on a formula that took account of the inflation rate, the financial performance of the pension plan’s fund, and the per capita growth of the economy. This approach was never adopted. But with hindsight, had it been, the evolution of defined benefit pension plans in Canada would have been very different, and likely better for both employees and employers.

Especially notable in the Task Force report is the second chapter, “Pensions as Transfers Between Generations”. This chapter set out a framework and set of principles to ensure that public pension plans are, and are seen to be, fair intergenerationally. This concept of fairness is essential if the public pension system is to be sustainable, through the decades of vicissitudes in inflation, unemployment, demographic change, and variations in real per capita economic growth. Indeed, after 40 years, these principles are especially salient as the baby boom birth cohort is now moving into its retirement years. – Comment by Michael C. Wolfson, January 2025

Michael C. Wolfson, A Guaranteed Income -Wolfson, Policy Options, January 1986

Michael C. Wolfson, The Arithmetic of Income Security Reform., Approaches to Income Security Reform, Shirley Seward and Mario Iacobacci, Halifax: Institute for Research on Public Policy, pp. 41-85, 1987

Provincial Ministers of Social Services, The Income Security System in Canada – Report for the Interprovincial Conference of Ministers Responsible for Social Assistance, aka The ITFASS Report (Interprovincial Task Force on the Administration of Social Security), CICS, 1980

Federal Provincial Social Security Review — Design 265– #265

Federal Provincial Social Security Review V2 -A-D

Federal Provincial Social Security Review V2- E-G

Federal Provincial Social Security Review V2 -VII and Appendix 1

Video

A video of my father, Cpl. Al Stapleton

Miscellaneous

Pontecorvo, Italy, 2019

The Conceit Song and The original

The Metcalf Foundation