Facts and figures: Does an Alberta Pension Plan make sense?

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Alberta has been embroiled over whether the province should claim autonomy over pensions and move away from the Canadian Pension Plan and towards an Alberta-run alternative.

While Albertans may like the idea of less of our money being controlled by Trudeau and Ottawa, Rebel News wanted to sort out fact from fiction and get into whether the financial logic behind bringing pensions under provincial control adds up.

Nadine Wellwood is a chartered investment manager who has been touring the province presenting her economic case for why a provincial pension in Alberta makes sense.

If her name sounds familiar, you may recognize her as former candidate for the United Conservative Party, the People’s Party of Canada and as a former Senate candidate for Alberta.

The focus of Wellwood’s town hall style stops across the province has been to provide a detailed economic account of the status of the Canadian Pension Plan and to provide a fiscally detailed prognosis of what an Alberta pension plan might look like for Albertans and for the rest of the country, and we were fortunate to join her at once such event to ask her some critical questions.

We asked Wellwood about Alberta’s disproportionate contributions to the CPP compared to other provinces and whether our population would ever get similar value out of the federal pension as what we have invested into it.

Wellwood also explained that Alberta is indeed legally entitled to establishing its own pension, in addition to being entitled to withdrawing contributions that have been made into the CPP, though she did acknowledge that there would likely be a legal battle with the Trudeau government in terms of agreeing on precisely how much we are entitled to.

We also discussed the sustainability of the CPP as it currently stands, in addition to discussing just how dire it would be for the CPP if Alberta was to leave, given that Alberta paying for a great deal of pensions for Canadians outside its own borders under the current system.

Critics of the idea of an Alberta pension have deferred to scare tactics in lieu of economic arguments, and they allege that Premier Danielle Smith is trying to “steal your pension.”

What they try to avoid acknowledging is the scary fact that Justin “the budget will balance itself” Trudeau currently has control over your pension, and that Alberta provincializing the pension may be better described as a rescue operation than as “stealing,” so we asked Wellwood whether the tension between CPP or APP ultimately boils down to whether Albertans trust Danielle Smith or Justin Trudeau more.

Finally, we discussed why Alberta always has to fight so hard under this Trudeau government to get things that other province, like Quebec, already have.