The median solvency ratio of Canadian defined benefit pension plans hit its highest level since before the 2007 financial crisis, according to the latest quarterly pension plan solvency survey by Aon Hewitt. On April 1, 2017, median solvency stood at 96.7 per cent, up nearly two percentage points since the beginning of the year. In […]
Canadian pensions’ solvency ratio holds steady through Q1.
In its report on employer pension plans in Canada published earlier this month, Statistics Canada noted the overwhelming majority of plan members are in trusteed arrangements. Of the 6.2 million members of employer-sponsored pension plans, 5.2 million are in arrangements managed by trusteed funds. But when it comes to just the defined contribution side of […]
Saving enough for retirement is a major challenge for many employees, so when a company’s plan design allows its staff to accumulate 15 per cent of their earnings and they only have to contribute five per cent themselves, it’s no surprise that nearly everyone is eager to jump on board. BASF Canada Inc.’s defined contribution […]
When Britain’s former economic watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading, published a report in 2013 about the country’s workplace defined contribution pension market, it was the latest call in the country’s ongoing conversation about pension governance and delivering value for money to plan members. The report estimated more than 186,000 pension plans in the country […]
OPSEU Pension Trust took a step to deepen the discussion institutional investors are having about climate change by releasing its own climate change scorecard this week, a Mercer report commissioned to assess and quantify the sensitivity of its investment portfolio to climate change risk. The report shows the estimated return implications under four climate scenarios and […]
Shows a 5.44 per cent drop in returns under most severe scenario.
Canadian pension plans have grown significantly over the past decade, a survey by Willis Towers Watson has found. Total pension assets were US$965 billion in 2006, compared to $1.6 trillion in 2016. The ratio of pension assets to gross domestic product grew by 30 percentage points in that decade, to 103 per cent in 2016 […]
Though Canada’s retirement income system was ranked eighth among 27 countries by the 2016 Melbourne Mercer Global Index, it also revealed the weaknesses in our retirement system. These weaknesses include that: three in four private sector workers don’t have access to an employer-sponsored pension plan; the level of household savings for middle-income earners is insufficient; […]
Last week, the Pension Investment Association of Canada was the latest group to lend its voice to the growing concern over the decumulation of Canadian’s retirement assets. Kevin Fahey, chair of the association, sent a letter to the minister of finance asking the government to update pension and tax regulations to address the lack of decumulation options […]