To the Editor,
Re: Country comes to rescue your retirement, Opinion, Sept. 15.
It’s hard to understand the ideological black hole in which Tom Fletcher continues to cower. His column, filled with the usual biased opinion against government, unrealistic expectations about the ability of most Canadians to save for retirement, confused numbers and an almost religious belief in the pseudo research of the Fraser Institute, implies that ‘the pension crisis’ is just something invented by the Trudeau government whose philosophy is to “discourage individual responsibility and increase state control.” That a pension crisis exists has been acknowledged for some time; we can either do something about it now or wait until we have seniors living under bridges and eating out of garbage cans sometime in the near future, when, unless we have become totally desensitized to the hardships of others, we will have to pay up anyway.
Taking his usual bash at public servants whose pensions he implies are unfairly subsidized by ordinary workers struggling to fund their own pensions, he ignores the fact that everyone’s pension funds, public or private, are subsidized by taxpayers in that pension funds set aside by an individual lessen taxes owed to society. A best-case scenario would be for everyone to have a defined benefit pension, the next best option is for the government, whose greater financial clout and expertise can maximize funds available to provide a guaranteed option for individual Canadians without workplace pensions. Maybe instead he should be asking why the private sector, which was able to fund pensions for its workers for many years, decided it would rather pay bonuses to its executives.
Liz FoxLantzville