Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Ontario Teachers' Claude Lamoureux favours governments to free markets


We learn today that Claude Lamoureux is calling for a National Pension Reform Summit.. This mirrors what the C D Howe Institute called for last week. This has become necessary because these two groups, along with other commercial interests like Power Corp and Manulife, interfered with the normal forces of the free markets and Canadian's chosen preferences for saving for retirement.

The emergence of the income trust market was the free capital market’s evolutionary response to how to provide a means for Canadians to provide income for retirement in a protracted low interest rate environment. It had the ancillary side benefit of maximizing the government’s take of the profits of Canadian businesses structured as trusts, by taxing them at the much higher marginal tax rates of individuals, which the Department of Finance can tell you is an average of 38%.

Groups like the CD Howe Institute and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan worked in concert with Flaherty and/or applauded his actions, to bring about the demise of the free market’s solution to the dilemma of providing income during retirement. Not realizing these retirement challenges that were exacerbated by their actions, they are now calling upon the government to fix the problem ....at the expense of the taxpayer, no doubt.

CD Howe and Ontario Teachers’ are the problem. Their statements of today are in complete hypocrisy with their actions of the past. For Teachers’ supportive position on Flaherty’s income trust blunder, (which was of net benefit to Ontario Teachers' as it provided them with a private income trust carve out, free of tax click here.
For CD Howe’s, simply read Finn Poschmann’s utterly lame and fact free testimony at the public hearings in February 2007.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pension--shmension---whose got a pension????

About 70% of Canadians do not have a defined Pension Plan once they retire.

Income trusts were a perfect solution for these lost souls such as myself--we could take our savings & turn them into a very nice income stream which had the ability to sustain us as we aged.

Then all of a sudden one night , it went poof thanks to Mr Flaherty & heavy lobbying by some of his cronies.

So what would have been wrong with leaving the trust market alone & letting us remain self-sufficient.

I think nothing!!!!

Dr mike Popovich

Anonymous said...

Right on the mark Dr Mike .. like many I once had a Defined Benefit Pension Plan .. but due to "right sizing" my assets were rolled into a Life Income Fund where Income Trusts provided both a good cash flow to me and a strong tax source for the elf .. and now? asset values killed .. distributions in the tank .. a Grade 5 kid could see the end result of this crap!