Pension Committee Report

David Harkness, Chair

Hello from the Pension Committee, everyone; we hope you all had an enjoyable summer with lots of time for yourselves, family, and friends.

Our first meeting is to make the transition from last year’s goals to this year’s goals is August 31. This will keep us busy, as I am new to the committee, and the economic environment is in a rapid state of flux.

On the good news front, Bill 208 will be proceeding to the Committee stage, and a number of retired teachers have signed up to speak at the Committee hearings when they are announced later this Fall. Your voices will be heard, and we are optimistic that the Bill will pass. All three parties have stated that they will support the Bill, and James Bedford, MTS President, is on board as well. If this Bill passes, the retired teachers of Manitoba will finally have a voice on the board that governs our pension plan—good news, indeed!

The bad news, of course, is that inflation took a large uptick this year due to a number of causes. Your TRAF pension is not fully indexed, but we are working on your behalf to encourage government to bring us into the fully indexed fold as quickly as possible. Because full indexing was not built into the Plan from its onset, this will be an expensive undertaking, and governments are very sensitive to expensive undertakings.

Better news is that CPP and OAS are fully indexed plans. Usually they are adjusted in January, but the Government of Canada has announced an automatic 10% increase to the OAS payment for those 75 and older, effective July 2022. Whether they will extend this to all CPP and OAS recipients in the future, remains to be seen. You may wish to discuss this with your MP when next you see him or her.

Adjustments to CPP and OAS are based on the Consumer Price Index. In 2019 Statistics Canada piloted a Senior’s CPI based on data from 2013 and 2015. It found that older adults generally spent relatively more on housing and health care, and relatively less on transport, recreation, clothing/ footwear, and alcohol or tobacco than the national average as a proportion of their budget. For more detail on this study, visit https://www150.statcan. gc.ca/n1/pub/62f0014m/62f0014m2019004-eng.htm.

Now, as a group we can be as varied and atypical as any other demographic in Canada. If you want to see where your personal CPI fits into the spectrum (nationally or by province/territory), visit https:// www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607x2020cal-eng.htm for Statistics Canada’s personal inflation rate calculator. 

Photo by Ellen Paxton RTAM Photo Contest Entry