Thread by @yomeeks

This is your daily pension announcement: This is the truth lives edition!!! Where we will celebrate truth in pension disclosure.
@edmontonjournal I am still waiting for my invitation to write an opinion piece. #handsoffmypension #ABLeg #abed

edmontonjournal.com/opinion/column…

But first from Travis who has kept a bit quiet lately... in a fawning editorial: “We believe it’s a budget that really reflects the mandate that Albertans gave us, Toews said Thursday."

Wrong.
No one gave you a pension mandate. Ever.
Nor were you given a mandate to cut AISH.

But back to Kevin's opinion piece. I want to explain a couple of things that he goes on about. Relax, Kevin says, this kind of pension hijacking is going on everywhere...

Kevin's exact words:
#handsoffmypension #AIMCOunderperforms

"Elsewhere in Canada and around the world there are active moves to build larger, more sophisticated institutional pools of capital, with the end objective of being able to invest more successfully and by more efficient means for the collective end-stakeholders."

One example that he is talking about is BC Investment Management Corp (BCIMC). It invests the BC Teachers' pension plan and almost all BC Public Sector Plans. I would rate the enterprise as successful. #onebigdifference
(Their current structure started in 2000.)

This is an example of a larger pool of capital that can invest successfully and efficiently.

What Kevin and Travis do not want you to know is that pension plans can leave BCIMC at any time. #choice

That's right if BC teachers (or any of the other plans) were unhappy with BCIMC they could pull out and set up their own investment manager. #notamonopoly

Kevin: "I am grateful for the vote of confidence that the Alberta government has made in AIMCo." Let us review who your clients are here... teachers, nurses, police officers, firefighters and many other workers.

Do you think they are giving AIMCo a vote of confidence?
#fail

Now over to the other pensions LAPP, PSPP, and SFPP. These plans, starting last March, had joint sponsorship. This is a risk sharing tool that included the ability of these plans to leave AIMCo. #breakingup

I must know go to the words of David J. Climenhaga, who says it better:

"Alberta law lets Kenney hijack teachers' retirement funds by legislative fiat and hand them over to the Alberta Investment Management Corp., commonly known as AIMCo, the Crown corporation set up to manage public sector pension funds. So he will."

"The Alberta government's pension agenda, readers need to understand, has nothing at all to do with looking out for the interests of teachers and retired teachers."

and finally...

"Independent governance for the LAPP and PSPP lets taxpayers off the hook for unfunded liabilities by the funds, so on the face of it this would seem like a natural policy for a bean-counting government like the UCP to support."

That's right the GOA just doubled its pension risk without ever studying it. Really? That was your mandate? Double the risk to taxpayers?

Please consider following David's blog at albertapolitics.ca