The benefits industry often talks about the need for organizations to change the design of their drug plans, but how many of them are actually doing it? A professor at the University of British Columbia shed some light on the trends during the opening session at Benefits Canada’s Face to Face in Drug Plan Management […]
Plan sponsors that have been hoping the recent trend of quickly rising drugs costs will end soon should realize “it’s only going to get worse” and start making changes to their benefits plans, an executive at Green Shield Canada said yesterday. “What’s happening right now is normal in benefit plans and it’s only going to […]
While the investment climate has generally been positive in recent months, investors can expect a macroeconomic “tug of war” in 2017, according to the head of TD Asset Management Inc. “On the one side of this tug of war are some good things from the perspective of the financial markets,” Bruce Cooper, chief executive and […]
When it comes to addressing the many challenges facing pension and benefits plans, we already know many of the solutions. Taking action on them, however, is often a different matter. As Benefits Canada reported in its annual report on drug plan trends last month, many plan sponsors have reached a crisis point around escalating costs. […]
While a recommendation that the government reverse course on maintaining the retirement age at 65 was one of the headline suggestions to come out of the recent report from the federal advisory council on economic growth, a key focus was on four sectors the group felt have a high potential for growth in Canada. One […]
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 […]
We often hear that to ensure a reasonable chance of having a good retirement outcome from a defined contribution pension plan, plan members should aim for total contributions of 15 per cent of their income to their retirement savings accounts. But how many Canadians are putting anywhere near that much away? It doesn’t seem likely. […]
A payment of $8,400 a month for nine years of service sounds like a fairly good pension benefit. But as a former Alberta government worker found out, it was too good to be true as the province decided it had made an error in calculating his benefit after he had already started collecting his pension. […]
Among the tax changes that took effect at the beginning of the year was the federal government’s removal of the credit for post-secondary education and textbooks. Provinces such as Ontario and New Brunswick have made similar moves as they seek to provide free tuition to students on low and moderate incomes. In those cases, governments […]
The new year has barely begun, but 2017 is already a big one for Benefits Canada. Among the developments is new ownership of Benefits Canada under Transcontinental Media since the beginning of December. Business, of course, continues as usual as Benefits Canada will keep bringing readers the content they need in print, on our website, […]