Ottawa's Pension Abyss: The Rapid Hidden Growth of Federal-Employee Retirement Liabilities

As Canadians saving for retirement are becoming painfully aware, rates of return on investment are much lower than they used to be. As a result, providing a given income in retirement now requires much more saving. Low returns are depressing incomes from RRSPs and defined-contribution pension plans, and causing target-benefit pension plans to reduce their promises. But defined-benefit pension plans cannot adjust their promises, and are showing large deficits. The largest and richest defined-benefit pensions in the country are those of federal government employees, and their situation is especially daunting. Despite recent high-profile changes to the pension plans of federal public servants, uniformed personnel and MPs, a critical flaw remains: the contributions to these plans, even after the changes, come nowhere close to covering the rocketing cost of their promises. Official figures on the current cost of these plans and their accumulated obligation use notional interest rates. Because their pension promises are guaranteed by taxpayers and indexed to inflation, the appropriate discount rate is the yield on federal-government real-return bonds, which is much lower than the assumed rate in official figures. A fair-value calculation shows that the values of different federal employee pension entitlements grow at rates from near 50 percent to more than 70 percent of pay annually. Even after the recent reforms, taxpayers will bear by far the greatest part of these costs. More startling yet is the accumulated unfunded liability of the plans, which at fair value stood at $267 billion at the end of March 2012, almost $118 billion worse than shown in the Public Accounts. The reforms did nothing to reduce the burden of this liability on taxpayers – who will have to fund most of these pensions as they become payable, even as they must save more to fund their own, less comfortable, retirements.