Ontario has concerns over Danielle Smith's CPP exit bid, but also a stark lesson for her

It may seem like a pile-on by now to Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservatives.

The Tory-run Ontario government came out Wednesday sounding the same alarm about Alberta's pension-plan flirtation as have (deep breath) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the Alberta NDP, British Columbia's premier,  Newfoundland and Labrador's premier, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, seniors' groups, organized labour, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, and various economists and pension experts.

But that isn't to say one should dismiss the remarks of Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy about a fractured Canada Pension Plan as just another voice in a growing chorus. His intention is to get all his provincial and territorial finance ministers together, plus federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, for an "urgent meeting" to discuss Alberta's idea as a pan-Canadian crisis in the making — a meeting she's agreed to. 

"As co-stewards of the CPP, it is our shared responsibility to safeguard the financial sustainability of the plan on behalf of workers and retirees across Canada," Bethlenfalvy wrote Freeland in an open letter (that's how one communicates on pension policy these days, I suppose).

He also became the latest person to question Alberta's assertion they're entitled to more than half of CPP's asset fund, worth one-third of a trillion dollars — a pie grab that would force other Canadians to pay more in contributions or receive smaller benefits to restore the fund's long-term health.

Given that Québec isn't part of CPP, the two largest partners in the pension plan (B.C. and Ontario) are now opposed, and they constitute 65 per cent of the population of that nine-province coalition. (Alberta represents 17 per cent of it.)

When Alberta fought Ottawa on carbon tax and the Impact Assessment Act, it had fellow provinces joining the court fight. When it tried axing equalization in a referendum, others looked the other way. But this is an anti-federal Alberta initiative that its neighbours and Confederation confreres see as a hostile, nation-damaging act.

Rather than further escalating the hostility, Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner agreed to host his counterparts in Calgary to talk pensions, along with some issues that get his province's nose out of joint (see: carbon tax and equalization, above).

But the depiction of this as a federal-provincial problem isn't the only reason Albertans may want to listen to some pension warnings from Ontario. Canada's largest province has some experience pursuing a standalone provincial pension plan of sorts, and has scars to show for it.

A little less than a decade ago, Kathleen Wynne was premier, and she worried publicly that Ontarians weren't saving enough for retirement. So her Liberal government proposed a supplementary contribution and benefits program, the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) — to serve in addition to CPP.

As the province began developing this program, it pursued a notion that has also occurred to both the Smith government and the authors of its Lifeworks report: that federal departments and the investment board that already manage the CPP could also run this provincial pension program.

Lifeworks set a huge range for setup costs for an Alberta Pension Plan, between $175 million and $2.2 billion, and the low end assumes Alberta could piggyback on what CPP and Ottawa already did in collecting contributions, dispersing benefits and managing the gargantuan fund.

Ontario had the same thought for its ORPP. But when it went pleading to the Canada Revenue Agency and other federal bodies, the answer every time came back: No. Do it yourself.

"They had absolutely no time whatsoever for Ontario to create a new thing for them to do," recalled Mahmood Nanji, who was the associate deputy minister for Ontario's Finance ministry and in charge of setting up ORPP. "We told them we would pay every cent of additional talent that they were going to use on this, and they refused."