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He chuckled and began explaining the CPP to me, and interrupted. “I know about the CPP,” I told him. “For my planning purposes, assume it doesn’t exist by the time I’m retired. I want anything I get from it to be a bonus.”

The CPP will probably still be around when I retire in 30-40 years (God willing). I don’t expect it or the country to spontaneously combust, and I think any Canadian government would go to the wall to keep it alive if it was ever teetering in some way. Still, as far as I’m concerned, to the greatest extent possible, I have to look out for my own future, and my kids’. A solvent, generous federal pension plan will be a lovely little boost to what I’m working hard to build for myself and them.

That hard work, obviously, involves the usual steps. Staying employed, hopefully thriving. It also means aggressively paying down what we owe on our house in Toronto. The hard work also involves planning for worst-case scenarios. Life insurance, lots of it, for us both, in case something terrible should happen. Making sure the kids are looked after is the number one priority.

Still, I’m skeptical about the proposed Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. The ORPP, which will likely kick in for me in 2017, is Ontario’s answer to a retirement savings crisis that there’s little evidence exists for most of the population. It’s bad enough that the Ontario Liberals, of all people, think they have any business telling anyone else how to reasonably manage their finances. (The fact that Premier Kathleen Wynne admitted at a press conference she doesn’t know how much this plan of hers will cost to administer speaks to this point.) If you’ll permit me a scriptural reference, I’d prefer it if they concerned themselves with the beams in their eyes before they fret too much about the motes in ours.