Article content

Once, long ago, when the world was young, Kathleen Wynne was a great believer in “national leadership.” If the federal government — I believe the prime minister in those far-off days was Stephen Harper — was unwilling to agree to an expanded Canada Pension Plan, then the government of Ontario would just have to go it alone with its own Ontario Retirement Pension Plan.

But now there is a different federal government, one committed to the very CPP expansion Wynne had championed, and Wynne is still signalling she intends to proceed with her plan. Indeed, where once Wynne painted her proposal as a Plan B in case CPP expansion did not go ahead, her position now is that the ORPP will be implemented next year, regardless.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Andrew Coyne: Ontario pension plan not about ‘helping’ retirees, but financing infrastructure Back to video

One begins to suspect the premier’s fervour has little to do with the CPP, and everything to do with her own desire for a provincial pension plan. At the same time, the province has always stressed that its own plan would be closely modelled on the CPP. And yet, the arguments against CPP expansion apply as much or more to the Ontario plan. Both are justified in the name of workers who have not set aside adequate savings for retirement — that is, enough to sustain them at roughly the same standard of living as in their working lives, generally held to require an income in retirement that is at least 50 per cent of their working income.