If you’re not worried about retirement income for yourself — or the next generation — then today is a good day to cheer on Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

If you believe your workplace pension can be counted on to pay you decent benefits (that is, if you even have one), then now is a fine time to congratulate Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

After all, life is good. Until it isn’t, in retirement.

By then it’s too late to make up for lost time and missed opportunities. That’s why now is the right time to send a wake-up call to our politicians.

Finance ministers from across the country are meeting Sunday and Monday outside Ottawa to pick up where they left off on pension reform — which, after four years of talking, is pretty much where they started. Thanks to Harper and Flaherty, who have been blocking any progress, the meetings are shaping up as a holding action and a historic failure.

Ontario and other provinces have pressed for reforms ever since the last financial crash exposed the vulnerabilities of our retirement system. All these years later, with the economy stabilized, it’s time to lay the groundwork for a robust pension system to plug the growing gaps in retirement incomes.

The federal Conservatives understand the looming shortfalls. But Harper and Flaherty have calculated that they can dodge and defer because Canadians remain oblivious to the pension problem.

It’s a matter of life before death. But pensions aren’t sexy or sensational.

Real pensions — you know, so-called “defined benefit” plans that are professionally managed and properly diversified to pay out the cheques they promised — are close to kaput. Barely one in four private sector employees has a workplace pension plan today, and that number will keep dropping as most employers stop offering defined benefit plans to new employees.

Who can blame them? Legacy companies are being hit hard by pension deficits: With aging workforces, they face growing liabilities and shrinking numbers of younger workers to buttress the plans. Auto workers in Flaherty’s Oshawa-Whitby riding could explain that to the finance minister.

Instead, companies are now offering so-called “defined contribution” plans — and you won’t hear me calling them pensions because, truthfully, they are glorified savings and investment plans whose payouts are utterly unpredictable, depending on market conditions. Just like RRSPs, which charge absurd management fees that eat into returns.

Pinstriped bankers and smarty-pants columnists will tell you that this proliferation of private retirement savings vehicles — not to be confused with real pension plans — is liberating in a free market. Individuals should act like grownups, save for the future and be deft day traders in their spare time — buying and selling stock to sock away money for their retirement kitties — while sitting on all that home equity thanks to rising prices, right?

It was a fine theory — until the last economic downturn exposed investors to reduced yields. As for home equity serving as a retirement cushion, tell that to the next generation of renters and condo dwellers.

Similar funding challenges confront the broader public sector, from university pension plans to Crown corporations and privatized ones from Canada Post to Air Canada. Once-proud companies are hamstrung by their unfunded pension obligations.

As existing pension plans wither away, we need to shore up Canada’s enduring pension success story, the CPP, by expanding it to pick up the slack. The CPP’s one drawback is that it pays out poorly: It only covers income below Canada’s average industrial wage, now about $50,000, which leaves many in the middle class short. Payouts are capped at just over $12,000 a year, far less than in most industrialized countries.

That’s why finance ministers are discussing how to increase payments responsibly to keep up with the retirement needs of future generations (not today’s affluent boomers). Properly designed, the enhancements could be applied efficiently, given that CPP disability and death benefits are not slated for increases — allowing modest premium increases to be stretched further for pensions alone. Moreover, the CPP investment board has among the highest returns and the lowest management fees in the industry.

Any increases would be fully funded, meaning that today’s older workers would not get an unearned windfall — only younger workers would capture the full benefits phased in over decades. And there is agreement that modest increases in CPP premiums would take several years to kick in, gradually, when the economy is more robust.

Yet there has been an intense campaign, mostly from small business lobbyists (who disdain pensions) and the Conservatives, to demonize any improvements. They claim any increased premiums would be a “job-killing payroll tax” going into government coffers (in fact, premiums are pension contributions — savings or deferred wages — that are invested in the economy to be paid out later to workers, not gobbled up by governments).

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Harper and Flaherty sometimes acknowledge that a CPP enhancement might not be such a dreadful idea, just not now. Surely, though, we should be using this time to put a plan in place so that when the economy is robust, a redesigned CPP is ready to go.

The alternative is to procrastinate in perpetuity. And miss a historic opportunity.