Ex-SaskTel staff worried about future of pensions
Former SaskTel employees want to be sure that their pension plan will be protected if the Crown corporation were to be sold.
About 4,100 people have signed a petition calling for that assurance.
The provincial government raised the idea of selling the Crown corporation last summer, but says it is not actively up for sale and there have been no offers for it.
Ron Carlson is the president of the Telephone Defined Benefits Pension Members Association. That plan has about 2,000 members, but since 1977, no new ones.
“Their concern is, should there be an offer, then as a member of this plan, what are their chances of getting their complete benefits?” said Carlson.
The pension plan has liabilities of about $200 million. Because it has opened to the door to selling SaskTel, pensioners think what happens to that liability is something the province should be able to answer.
Concerned members of the pension plan contend no potential buyer of SaskTel would accept the responsibility of the pension’s liability. They fear if a sale were to happen the plan would be left in limbo — without funding from the province or new owner — and unable to provide pensioners with all the benefits to which they are entitled.
Pressed on the issue at a committee meeting in December, Dustin Duncan, the minister in charge of SaskTel, said at that time that if SaskTel had a change in ownership, the obligation to pay out pensions would either be transferred on to the purchaser of the company, or the outstanding shortfall amount would come from the bottom line of the Crown’s selling price.
Carlson says that doesn’t add up in his mind.
“Quite frankly, his response that it would come off the bottom line, I think, poses an interesting problem,” he said, adding nobody will want to buy a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in liabilities.
NDP MLA Warren McCall, who accepted the petitions, said the former Crown employees should automatically be given assurances their pension will remain stable.
“If they can’t provide a written assurance to the people that built SaskTel, there is something very wrong there,” he said.
Duncan says any talk about the matter is hypothetical.
“Certainly before government made a decision about that, the pension issue, we would obviously have to address that,” he said.
He gave his assurance that the pension is secure and reiterated that talk about a sale is speculative.
“Their pension is secure and I don’t see that changing,” he said.