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“It’s about protecting the most vulnerable. This is what the ORPP is designed to do. It is also designed to encourage companies to foster pension plans, be it ORPP or any other pension plan that is comparable,” Sousa said.

He added that he has been told the NHL’s pension is a “rich one” and is a registered plan, “albeit in a different country.” The NHL’s plan was created after the last collective bargaining process in 2013 and is registered in the United States. QP Briefing reported that it was optimized for U.S. tax laws. Seven of the NHL’s 30 teams are located in Canada and only two are in Ontario.

However, Sousa said it has not yet been determined if the hockey league’s pension plan meets terms for an exemption from the coming Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. That will have to wait until after the ORPP Administration Corporation has had a chance “to review the comparability” of their pension scheme.

“I will let those discussions be had,” he said.

Clancy Zeifman, a spokesperson for the associate minister of finance Mitzie Hunter, who is responsible for the ORPP, said all employers in Ontario will undergo a “verification process” to determine whether their plans are considered comparable to the new provincial plan.

The process will also determine in which phase of the rollout organizations subject to ORPP will need to begin making contributions.

“The ORPP Administration Corporation will lead this process, and will make a determination on which employers must enroll based on the government’s comparability thresholds,” Zeifman said.

Last month, Sousa announced plans to start payroll deductions for the ORPP a year later than originally planned, to give provinces including Ontario time to work with the new federal Liberal government on a possible expansion of the Canada Pension Plan.

Ontario’s government created the ORPP only after it became clear under the last federal government that the CPP would not be expanded.

The new timeline has the Ontario government beginning to enroll employers in the ORPP in January of next year, and starting to take deductions from paycheques in 2018.

Financial Post