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Ontario’s $20 million “investment” in its recently departed pension plan, therefore, is nothing to get worked up about according to Premier Kathleen Wynne, who credits her government with helping to see to the enhanced Canada Pension Plan, which was announced by the federal government early last week. “Quite frankly, I was a thorn in the side of many of my colleagues,” Wynne said during the press conference in which she finally laid her Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) to rest. “I kept bringing this up. I kept making it clear that we were moving ahead, and I kept making it clear that we all knew that there was a national problem.”

The implication, thus, is had the Liberal government not charged ahead with its ill-conceived pension plan, Canadians would still be headed towards a retirement crisis that experts still aren’t convinced exists, and may or may not be remedied by this enhancement to Canada’s federal pension plan. According to Wynne, Ontario simply had to spend that $20 million on research, administration and advertising, or else the federal government would still be twiddling its thumbs on CPP reform — all while middle-class Canadians ineptly continued trying to manage their own money. How could they let that happen?

It’s basically the equivalent of the change found between the couch cushions when we’re talking about Ontario Liberal scandals

Ontarians are now left to reconcile complicated, contradictory feelings that both celebrate the death of a terrible pension plan and, at same time, lament another situation wherein the government spent tens of millions dollars on nothing. And try as we might, it’s hard to get too upset: indeed, while $20 million certainly isn’t nothing, in the alternate universe of Ontario, where net-zero contract negotiations with teachers end up costing $300 million, and where a busted smart metre program costs the government $2 billion, and where the MaRS office tower in downtown Toronto needs a government bailout of $300 million, plus construction costs, this actually is almost a form of progress. Sure, we’d like to care about $20 million spent on nothing, but it’s basically the equivalent of the change found between the couch cushions when we’re talking about Ontario Liberal scandals.