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Naturally, the briefing left some questions unanswered: How will the ORPP incorporate self-employed Ontarians? Would the Ontario government scrap the program if the federal government expands CPP? And what will be the administrative costs of rolling out the program?

The answer, in each case, was essentially a shrug: “We are working to make this a low-cost plan,” the premier said, conceding that at this point she can’t speak to numbers. That is, of course, quite rich from a government lecturing Ontarians about improperly managing their finances. Pressed on how the plan might affect employees who might not be able to afford setting aside an extra 1.9 per cent, Minister of Finance Charles Sousa cited the billions in unused RRSP contributions as evidence that people can save for retirement, but are choosing not to.

In fact, there is ample evidence that Ontarians are much better prepared for retirement than the government would have us believe, between CPP, Old Age Security, RRSPs, savings and private equity. Indeed, a June report from the C.D. Howe Institute suggested that most of us can retire comfortably on less than the traditional 70 per cent of pre-retirement income target, considering that many of our daily budget strains (childcare, mortgage payments, etc). settle by the time we reach retirement age.

What’s more, another recent study from the Fraser Institute found that forced government savings plans might very well offset Canadian households’ private savings after looking at CPP investment in the 1990s and finding that with every percentage point increase in CPP contributions, private savings dropped by 0.895 percentage points. This suggests that Ontario’s forced savings plan won’t actually ensure that Ontarians save more, but simply that they save differently. It also just so happens to ensure that the $3-billion or so to be collected annually by the time the ORPP is fully implemented in 2020 will kept in the hands of the government, allowing for “new pools of capital for Ontario-based project such as building roads, bridges and new transit,” as stated in last year’s budget. Oh yes, and for your retirement.