CPP Showdown: Little desire for creation of new provincial plans across the country – including in Alberta

Contributed

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had the rest of the country’s attention in early November, after announcing that she believed her province to be entitled to more than half of the value of the Canada Pension Plan if it follows through on threats to leave the plan and form its own provincial alternative.

Those compensation numbers have been disputed, but Ottawa has yet to provide its estimate of how much Alberta would receive were it to leave the CPP. As Alberta pauses public consultations on its pension proposal while it awaits Ottawa’s figures, new data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds little appetite among Albertans or other Canadians to find out just what a CPP without Alberta would mean.

Indeed, half of Albertans (48%) say they oppose the idea of forming a provincial pension plan and leaving the federal program. This group is countered by 36 per cent in the province who support the proposal.

More than half in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Atlantic Canada oppose this idea, while higher levels of support come from Saskatchewan (31%), and from Quebec (32%), which has had its own pension plan since the beginning.

Any province is eligible to leave the CPP with three years notice, but few would like their own to follow this path. The concept is most popular in Saskatchewan (37%), though opposition still wins out (44%). At least 57 per cent in all other provinces canvassed say they would not like to see their province go that route.

Much of the hesitation in Alberta appears to be regarding the disputed amount of benefit that Albertans would be eligible to receive. The prevailing sentiment is that there would be no change (18%) or a net loss (51%) to their own retirement savings. That said, three-in-10 Albertans (31%) feel they would end up receiving more in the future under an Alberta pension plan, compared to the CPP.