Lethbridge residents want to keep their CPP

In May I will celebrate nine years since my first election as the MLA for LethbridgeWest.

This work has been an honour like no other. I have met so many Lethbridgeans and feel like I have watched your children grow and your flower gardens flourish over the years of knocking on your doors.

I am thankful every day for the trust you have placed in me to voice your concerns.

I have spoken to thousands of you over the years and while there are a lot of things that divide us as a province, I can tell you that there are a few things that we all agree on and one of them is pensions.

The inbox in my office has almost 4,000 emails about protecting CPP. No other issue has garnered that kind of agreement.

In fact, my staff can only recall that Daylight Savings time has garnered more email responses, but that issue was evenly split between those who love it and those who hate it. Not so with the CPP emails: the support is unanimous.

The Canada Pension Plan is widely supported and for good reason. As you know, every employee, from their first jobs, contributes to the CPP and their employers match the contribution. But did you know only about 20 per cent of the pension plan funds come from the contributions?

Almost 80% of the fund is a result of investments of that money and the return on those investments. Canadians have a strong pension plan fund because we have had excellent management of the investments.

Key to the CPP’s success is that investments are managed by the CPP Investment Board, an arm’s length board created in 1997 and explicitly, since its creation, immune from political interference.

The CPP has shown the best rate of return of any national pension plan in the world with a 10-year annualized rate of return (2013-2022) of 10.9 per cent.

Along with being a leading global pension fund, the CPP keeps a particular focus on investing in North America, thus helping businesses succeed at home too. The fund is currently worth over $590 Billion and is secure for generations of pensioners.

So when Danielle Smith and the UCP government tried to pitch their idea of an Alberta Pension Plan (APP) to pull Albertans’ retirement security from the CPP many people asked why.

Well, the simplest answer is that the UCP would like to politically interfere in the investments made by an APP in a way that no government is allowed to do with the CPP.

They want to decide what failing industry should be bailed out by your pension security. I can tell you that Albertans can see through the UCP façade. They do not trust this government with their pension funds and they do not like the idea that a government, any government, should be making political decisions about investments.

The UCP have promised all sorts of benefits from having an APP that are fanciful, at best.

But they have really undermined Albertans’ trust by claiming an APP would be able to have more than half the assets of the CPP. Albertans know when something sounds too good to be true and they can tell this APP idea is a bad one.

My inbox is filled with emails about protecting the CPP, but you don’t have to believe me.

Public opinion polls have consistently shown huge disapproval numbers for an APP and overwhelming support for staying in the CPP.

In fact, support for the CPP is not even partisan: supporters of the UCP have overwhelmingly rejected the idea of an APP in every opinion poll.

Politicians as diverse as the leader of the Conservative Party to every provincial premier have spoken out against the UCP plan to create an APP. There is no support for an APP outside the Premiers’ office!

The effort to communicate Albertans’ disdain for leaving the CPP has been widespread. Our NDP caucus held numerous townhalls across the province where we heard from all kinds of people about how much they wanted to protect their CPP retirement.

Groups organized across the province to speak out and to inform people about the risks of leaving the CPP. Emails, calls, and visits to MLAs came from people in every corner of the province and of every partisan background.

In the Legislature one day I asked, only half-jokingly, what it would take to get the message through to the UCP elites that nobody wanted an APP.

I asked the Minister of Finance if we needed to hire a plane to do skywriting or have a lawn sign campaign.

Well, my skywriting plan went up in smoke, but the lawn signs idea took off.

So, yesterday in Lethbridge, we launched a cross-province lawn sign campaign to Protect Our CPP.

People can now order a sign for their yard or window that makes it clear to the UCP that we have no interest in leaving the CPP and have no trust in a provincial plan that would have future governments make investment decisions.

If you would like one of the signs you can order one from albertasfuture.ca/handsoff-our-cpp

Keep those emails and calls coming too. The UCP MLAs need to know that your vote depends on their support for your pension security in the CPP.

Feel free to contact me about this or any provincial concern at 403-329-4644 or by email to lethbridge.west@assembly.ab.ca