Pensions: What you need to know
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Charles Walker spent his summer overseeing the death of 1,167 retirement dreams.
After 22 years as vice-president of finance at a perennially struggling aluminum mill in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, northeast of Montreal, Mr. Walker was accustomed to tough assignments. But nothing prepared the retiree for his comeback task: assessing the health of the mill’s three pension plans after the company was forced into liquidation proceedings in March by its bankrupt Ohio parent, Aleris International Inc.
For three sweltering months, Mr. Walker, 65, toiled in the mill’s abandoned, airless offices, making calculation after calculation. His final tally: $46.2-million of pension deficits.
That tab, he estimates, will erase between 30 and 40 per cent of the pensions owed to him and his fellow retirees and employees. “I felt like I was in a morgue,” Mr. Walker says.
“You look at this and you say, ‘Jesus, this is painful’ … I know people in the plant, I know their families. So it is very, very agonizing to see these people who have worked all their life to try and get a pension – and, all of a sudden, it falls apart.”
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Canadians are facing a national pension meltdown. Decades in the making, it has worsened dramatically during the recession. Businesses are shredding pension promises, retirement savings are shrinking, employees are working longer and the elderly are selling homes and returning to the workforce. As the retirement dream fades, policymakers seem unwilling to tell Canadians they have not saved enough to retire.
“We have overestimated our capacity to protect the needs of retirees,” says Harry Arthurs, former head of an Ontario commission that identified numerous flaws in the province’s pension regime.
“We now know there is no such thing as a pension or retirement promise,” Mr. Arthurs says. “There is no certainty.”
A slow retreat by companies from their pension obligations turned into a gallop this year after a severe global recession laid bare the frailties of the promises made to employees. The withdrawal is major factor behind a startling statistic: Eleven million Canadian workers, about 60 per cent of the work force, do not have a pension plan.
Those corporate pension plans left standing also face unprecedented stresses. Market turmoil has punched an estimated $50-billion deficit hole into Canada’s corporate pension funds, according to experts who have crunched what little current data is available.
The cost of replenishing the deficit is squeezing businesses when they can least afford it. Pension costs are spiralling as retirees live longer and the baby boom generation heads for the exits: More than 40 per cent of workers will reach retirement age over the next two decades.
