Alberta Pension Plan
Why is this such a hard question?
This is the anniversary of the Firewall letter.
Of all the ideas in the 2001 Firewall Letter, the Alberta Pension Plan is the biggest and best. And it is the easiest to complete.
When we met with Ralph Klein to discuss the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan, Finance had one objection presented against an Alberta Pension, they said, “The benefits to Albertan businesses and taxpayers over other provinces would be so great that companies and people would demand to move to Alberta and the number of new Albertans would strain our infrastructure.”
Two thoughts occurred to me. First, I had underestimated the immediate financial value of imitating Quebec and running our own pension plan. The Finance experts thought it would be much more advantageous.
Second, what the Department of Finance officials feared sounded like a great problem to have. We would attract more people, industry and business.
Alberta demographics are so different from the rest of Canada that what we get as a payout from our contributions is much less important than what we have to pay in the future. If we got a fraction of what we are entitled to and held pension contributions at the same level, we could payout much more in benefits.
So it all seemed to make sense, but the people would not support it, for reasons none of us understood, and still don’t understand.