Is Immigration a Benefit for White Canadians?
- Thread starter TomFord1980
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The Canada Pension Plan is, and has always been, a collective fund, rather than a collection of individual plans, (where one's future benefits would be directly linked to one's total contributions, plus investment income, paid as a life annuity). The method by which CPP is funded is not relevant in my post. The simplified model of the pyramid base paying benefits for the pyramid peak has essentially remained unchanged. This is true for every defined benefit plan.To catch you up on recent events, the CPP switched from pay as you go to a funded reserve approach in the 1990's.
Canada Pension Plan - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Defined benefit plans have funding problems in the following situations:
a) The number of recipients increases, but the number of contributors decreases, (this is true in Canada, because of the size of the Baby Boomer generation, as compared to the generations which followed it).
b) Life expectancy increases, (benefits entitlements are paid for a longer period than anticipated).
c) Investment earnings of the fund as less than the actuarial projection.
d) Disability pension rates increase, (members begin to receive benefits at an earlier age than expected).
e) Ad hoc increases are higher than as projected, (eg: a cost of living increase based on above-average inflation).
f) An increase in the average age of contributing members.
All of these were contributing factors in the Teamsters plan I worked on, and the end result was a reduction to all pension benefits, both present and future.
In any Unionized business, Seniority within the Company or Union is a major factor, affecting wages, choice of jobs, overtime hours, and job security.
Most of the time, the employees with the most seniority are also the oldest. This means that if the company wants to reduce Unionized staff, through layoff or attrition, the young go and the old stay. The Teamsters do physical labour, and older workers with a lot of mileage on their bodies can't do as much as a young buck, they get injured on the job more often, and they take longer to recover from injury.
If the average age at retirement was, say, 62 years, and the average age of the employees was 35, there would be 27 years between when pension contributions were made, and when the benefit entitlements were paid out. If the average age of employees increased to 48.5, the deferral period would be halved, so contribution monies would have half as long to increase in value before having to be paid out.
When a company went out of business or ceased to participate in the Union Plan, There would suddenly be a large number of unanticipated immediate retirements for members who had been expected to work and contribute for additional years. There were also many members with high seniority who could only do 'light duty' jobs, (like manning the check-in gate), who met the definition of 'disabled' if their employer ceased to participate.
With the Teamsters, large Plan improvements were tied to the 1988 Collective Bargaining Agreement, and one of the larger employers ceased to participate at the end of the previous agreement, something not anticipated by the actuary. In addition, the investment managers had below average returns around that time. This led to a funding crisis which required large increases to the monthly contribution rate per member, which in turn led to other employers ceasing to participate. The end result was a 28% reduction to all current and future benefits, imposed by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institution ten years later, (the OSFI is the governing body for pension plans registered Federally, rather than Provincially).
btw, if anyone reading this starts a Unionized job where there is some possibility of layoff, my advice would be to learn the Collective Bargaining Agreement in full, then attempt to become Shop Steward as quickly as possible. Chances are, the current Steward is some old fuck who would be more than happy to relinquish that duty. In the event of layoffs, the Shop Steward is, (at least in the Teamsters), considered to be #2 on the Seniority list, regardless of their actual seniority within the company or Union.
Yeah, your dad was born at a good time. Missed WW2 and got in there before the boomers and women clogged up the jobs. Also, North America enjoyed a free ride for a time with Japan and Germany bombed out. My dad was born in 1918 and missed out on the good jobs(parts manager in a dealership). He was a WW2 pilot but was not drafted.
I believe some demographers put our baby boom ending in 1966. It was a little longer than the U.S. It was also very large in the 50s and 60s compared to the U.S. with all the European immigrants coming to Canada. I was born in 1965. A shit time to born male. See below for salaries and pensions. Competing for tiny group of females a couple of years younger also.
I see a difference between the early boomers, (1946-52), the middle group, (1953-59), and those born in the 1960's.
1940's/ 50's boomers are notorious for treating anyone younger than themselves as inferior, especially within families. 1960's boomers were often the younger brothers and sisters in those families.
I was born in 1961, and I'm the youngest in my family. I have really no common interests with my 1950's-born siblings, then or now.
If the parents weren't children or teens during the 1930's depression, it's less likely that they forced their kids to eat squash or turnip, (which all the kids in my family hated), 'in case someone served that when you're a guest in their house'.
Like a lot of kids, we would palm the turnip, and feed it to the dog under the table. I don't think there's a worse smell on Earth than a dog's turnip fart. Ours would literally run away from the smell of his own fart. I know, it's hard to imagine a smell that's offensive to a dog's nose. Dog turnip farts are THAT ripe.
Being born in 1961, I believe you would be a part of the original GenX(David Foot, Douglas Coupland), before the age range got totally mangled. The boom peaked in the late 50s, early 60s.
Also being the youngest, it was hard to relate. For example, my oldest sister turns 75 this month. My brother, 7 years older, was into Jethro Tull and Steely Dan, when I was a kid. That group had a lot of guys on drugs in that brief period around the mid 1970s when Canadians took our standard of living for granted.
The demographics of the baby boom and bust is exactly why the changes were made to the CPP in the 90's. The CPP isn't relying on increasing immigration to handle the baby boomer demographic shift.
I 'self identify' as a GenX elder, as opposed to a baby baby boomer.
I also didn't live with my parents, (except in the summer), for more than a few months total after age 16 1/2. I was a high school graduate, (grade 11 in Quebec), and I was in school or working after that.
I have an older sister who's 73. She has this delusion that the family is a dynasty whereby she is now 'in charge' because the parents are dead. There's nothing to be in charge of, because we all live hundreds of miles apart. There are other reasons that I won't go into that help explain why I'm completely estranged from the lot of them.
CPP assumed an overly optimistic rate of live births in Canada to provide its future funding. Immigration priorities since 1967 have changed to focus on non-Europeans because other ethnic groups tend to have larger families. These changes were directly related to the drop in birth rate among women already living in Canada. Benefits introduced by Lester B. Pearson's Liberal Government in the 1960's required many young Canadians, as opposed to just more people. It isn't the working immigrants who are essential to the equation, it's their children.
I gotta ask for a source on this. The immigration waves up to about the last 20 years have been a lot of chinese and eastern european immigrants. The immigration system favoured the educated, which i think tend to be like educated canadian born women and not have large families.
For example, this paper below works out that immigrant birth rates are suppressed for a number of years after arrival, and only a few places of origin end up higher than native born canadians. Asian immigrants tend to have lower fertility rates than native born canadians, for example, and about the same as immigrants from the US or Europe.
