David Denison is a former chief executive of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.Claude Lamoureux, Jim Leech and Ron Mock are former CEOs of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.What is the purpose of a pension plan? That’s a strange question to ask in this country, where we have spent nearly three decades building a Canadian pension model that is respected and coveted around the world.
Yet, more than 90 Canadian business executives recently signed an open letter calling for governments to make re-evaluating that pension model “a national priority,” with a focus on introducing unclear mandates not related to financial returns. So, we must start at the beginning. Put simply, the purpose of a pension plan is to help secure the financial future for Canadian workers by delivering promised pension benefits at a reasonable cost. Those benefits come from two sources. First, hard-working Canadians and their employers spend decades contributing to pension plans with the promise of financial security i