Ontario Pension Policy Making and the Politics of CPP Reform, 1963–2016

Abstract

After years of pension policy drift in a broader context of global austerity, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was enhanced for the first time in 2016 to expand benefits for Canadian workers. This article examines Ontario's central role in these reforms. The deteriorating condition of workplace plans, coupled with rising retirement income insecurity across the province's labour force, generated new sources of negative feedback at the provincial level, fuelling Ontario's campaign for CPP reform beginning in the late 2000s. The political limits of policy drift and layering at the provincial level is considered in relationship to policy making at the national level. As shown, a new period of pension politics emerged in Canada after 2009, in which the historical legacy of CPP's joint governance structure led to a dynamic of “collusive benchmarking,” shaped in large part by political efforts of the Ontario government, leading to CPP enhancement.

Canadian Public Policy: The State of the Discipline

“…The conditioning impact of Canada's federal system on the motivations, resources and behaviour of political actors and attendant policy outcomes has received considerable attention. The allocation of authority, including fiscal resources, across the two orders of government has been linked to motivations of competitive state-building and collusive benchmarking on the part of federal and provincial governments with respect to social policies (Béland and Weaver, 2019;Christensen, 2020). Concurrent jurisdiction has also created incentives and opportunities for bureaucratic entrepreneurship in provincial immigration and integration policies (Paquet, 2014(Paquet, , 2019.…”

“…While their methods of analyzing data (and research goals) differ, positivist-oriented scholars also tend to make use of interpretivist methods to access data: that is, observing/participating, interviewing, and reading documents. 2 Studies of discrete reforms, including to policy instruments, examine income maintenance in Saskatchewan (Daigneault, 2015), contributory pensions in Ontario (Christensen, 2020), schools in Ontario (Thompson and Wallner, 2011), federal product risk regulation (Kiss, 2014), protection of water resources in Alberta (Heinmiller, 2013), climate change instruments in Alberta (Boyd, 2019), grain marketing (Skogstad and Whyte, 2015) and processes for developing energy resources in some provinces (Hoberg and Phillips, 2011;Martens et al, 2015). 3 See monographs on Quebec's social economy (Arsenault, 2018), the social and economic policies of Quebec and Ontario (Haddow, 2015), national policies with respect to assisted reproductive technologies (Scala, 2019), early childhood education and care in British Columbia (L. Pasolli, 2015), immigration (Gaucher, 2018), multiculturalism (McCoy, 2018, primary and secondary education (Wallner, 2014), provincial energy resource development (Clancy, 2011;Urquhart, 2018), national (Doern et al, 2015) and provincial (Carter, 2020;Winfield, 2012) environmental protection, and national climate change policy (Macdonald, 2020).…”

“…2Studies of discrete reforms, including to policy instruments, examine income maintenance in Saskatchewan (Daigneault, 2015), contributory pensions in Ontario (Christensen, 2020), schools in Ontario (Thompson and Wallner, 2011), federal product risk regulation (Kiss, 2014), protection of water resources in Alberta (Heinmiller, 2013), climate change instruments in Alberta (Boyd, 2019), grain marketing (Skogstad and Whyte, 2015) and processes for developing energy resources in some provinces (Hoberg and Phillips, 2011; Martens et al, 2015). …”

From Retrenchment to Selective Social Policy Expansion: The Politics of Federal Cash Benefits in Canada

“…The intergovernmental dynamics leading to CPP expansion did not involve the usual competitive turfclaiming between Ottawa and Quebec; indeed Quebec, which had already been forced in 2011 to raise QPP tax rates above those for the CPP because of its less favourable demographic situation, was reluctant to simply copy CPP expansion. It was rather the Ontario Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne that passed legislation creating a mandatory, supplemental Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) for workers who did not have a "comparable" workplace-based plan; it would go into effect starting in 2017 in the absence of federal action (Christensen, 2020). With the Trudeau government in office, all of the CPP-participating provinces agreed to a gradual expansion from 25 to 33 per cent of earnings (up to average earnings) financed by increased payroll contributions, a move that the Couillard government in Quebec eventually agreed to match (Béland and Weaver, 2019).…”

Social Insurance as Fiscal Policy and State-Building Tool: The Development and Politics of Payroll Contributions in Israel and Canada

“…In fact, in the mid-1960s, the then Conservative government of the most populous province, Ontario, did not see eye to eye with Ottawa on pension reform. Rather than a federal earnings-related pension programme, Ontario promoted the expansion of private pensions as an alternative to the creation of a public old-age insurance programme (Christensen, 2016: 87). More importantly for this paper, Québec was in the midst of the so-called Quiet Revolution associated with massive provincial state-building efforts that clashed with the centralising tendencies of the Canadian federal system and led to provincial push back in which social policy initiatives proved essential (Béland and Lecours, 2008).…”