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Wynne and Sousa pushed the federal Conservatives to expand the CPP and got nowhere, so they set out to do it as best they could in Ontario. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is more receptive to the idea, so a national expansion of public pensions might displace the ORPP but the provincial government is going ahead anyway, with the hope of rolling an Ontario plan into a bigger national plan eventually.

The Liberals have studies, including one from the respected Conference Board of Canada and another with former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge’s name on it, saying that although there’d be a short-term economic hit to Ontario while people get used to plugging money into the ORPP instead of spending it, in the long term the province — meaning both the public treasury and the economy in general — would be better off.

In the meantime, the plan could be a source of funds for the provincial treasury to borrow from for infrastructure projects. The money would have to be invested somewhere, after all.

The Progressive Conservatives have been against the ORPP from the beginning: It’s a tax grab, the government bossing you around, a slush fund for Liberal-favoured construction projects. They have a Fraser Institute paper rebutting the others. Brown’s former leadership competitor Monte McNaughton ran on the same repeal-and-refund pledge Brown’s making now.

History is full of policies that opposition parties said were bad but learned to live with. But the ORPP is unusual: by the time of the 2018 election, it’ll have just started taking money in but won’t be paying out. Sousa and Wynne have been clear that you’ll only get money from it if you’ve paid into it. It’ll have costs but no benefits yet.

So politically, cancelling the ORPP probably won’t come with a big hit. In fact, Brown will probably be able to promise workers and employers several hundred dollars back in their pockets.

That couldn’t happen if Wynne and other premiers work with Trudeau on a national pension deal sometime in the next couple of years. But if the pension plan stays a provincial program, it’ll be very vulnerable to a change of government in 2018.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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