The great Harper pension charade is underway. Last week, Finance Minister Joe Oliver announced that he is asking Canadians for their views on an expansion of the Canada Pension Plan — provided they agree with him in advance that any such expansion should be “voluntary.”

A voluntary Canada Pension Plan is, of course, a nonsense — but it doesn’t matter, because the Harper Conservatives’ “consultation” on a voluntary expansion of the CPP is merely a ruse. Stephen Harper has no intention of expanding the CPP. He hates the CPP.

Why? First off, it was created by a Liberal government in the 1960s — which makes it, to Harper’s way of thinking, intrinsically bad, like peacekeeping, support for the United Nations or the Maple Leaf flag. Making it worse is the fact that the CPP is a social program that is based on the idea that government, employees and their employers have a joint responsibility to help Canadians of all incomes save for their retirement. For Tories of the Harper ilk who believe that government exists to cut taxes and support the armed forces — and little else — this is anathema.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that the CPP has been fabulously successful. When it ran into funding difficulties in the 1990s, the federal government at the time (Liberals, again), in cooperation with the provinces and backed by a strong public service, fixed the plan and created the CPP Investment Board, now one of the world’s most respected pension fund managers.

Faced with longer life spans, the erosion of traditional employer-based pension plans and the uncertainty of investment returns from the contributory plans that have replaced them, Canadians like the idea of a modest expansion of the CPP. The provinces are generally on side as well. But the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), the country’s most influential lobby group, is firmly opposed.

The CFIB (which seems at times to have more influence on government policy than the Department of Finance) feels no responsibility to the millions of low-salary, non-unionized workers whom its members employ — the very people who would benefit most from an expanded CPP. For the CFIB, an expanded CPP is “a job-killing payroll tax” — a phrase Mr. Oliver tends to parrot whenever asked.

Calling the CPP premiums a payroll tax is disingenuous to say the least. Unlike income tax, CPP contributions don’t disappear from paycheques into government coffers. The money goes into the pension plan and every cent that an employee contributes results in credit for a future pension. Better still, every employee dollar is matched by an employer contribution. It may be forced savings but it’s not a payroll tax — and Canadians know it.

A ‘voluntary’ CPP makes no sense; it would be as ridiculous as making medicare voluntary. A ‘voluntary’ CPP makes no sense; it would be as ridiculous as making medicare voluntary.

The Tories love to dump on the idea of a mandatory expansion of the CPP by making it sound like the act of some totalitarian regime. But the CPP only works as well as it does because it is mandatory. An employee can work part-time or have a dozen or more employers during a career — and every cent he or she contributes towards retirement is still captured by the system. A mandatory system also creates huge benefits of scale and leaves out no working Canadian.

A ‘voluntary’ CPP makes no sense; it would be as ridiculous as making medicare voluntary. When he was Finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty rejected the idea of a voluntary expansion because “it would not work and because the CPP would be unable to administer it.” Ted Menzies, then the minister responsible for pensions, said in 2010 that a voluntary expansion was “not a good idea,” adding that “the consensus of governments and public-interest groups from across the political spectrum has been that this would be costly, ineffective and, ultimately, a misguided solution.”

A voluntary expansion of the CPP would mean taking half of the dollars off the table, because employers would get a pass on contributions; any voluntary expansion would be half as big as a compulsory one. Currently, the CPP Investment Board doesn’t run individual accounts. It gets a big cheque from the government periodically to invest at the best return possible. All Ottawa does is track the contributions an employee makes over the years and calculates the benefit that can be expected at retirement. And for the retiree, the pension is totally predictable.

Forcing the CPP to run millions of individual accounts, many with tiny amounts of money to invest, would make it no more efficient than the financial institutions already in the business — and likely would leave financial returns and the added pension payments to the vagaries of the market.

In short, making a CPP expansion voluntary would solve nothing. Canadians have no shortage of voluntary means of saving for their retirement. At the end of 2013 there was $790-billion in unused RRSP room and another $592-billion billion in unused TFSA savings room. Apart from the wealthiest Canadians, only a tiny fraction of us have enough spare cash to voluntarily fill all of our RRSP and TFSA space. What middle-income Canadians need is more forced savings for their retirement, achieved with the help of employers and facilitated by government.

The provinces and the two main opposition parties recognize this need. The Tories, at least, recognize the optics at work — which is why they’re throwing out the idea of a voluntary top-up as a distraction, so that they at least claim to be taking the problem seriously why they wait for voters to give up on the notion. Hence the consultation, which ends on Sept. 10.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the results of the consultation won’t be available until several weeks later — until after election day has come and gone. How convenient.

Alan Freeman is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.

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