Wild About Writing

He was Canada’s most successful politician — Prime Minister of the country for 22 years — and he’d probably have some answers for the questions now being raised about the future of pensions in Canada.

William Lyon Mackenzie King brought in Canada’s first old age pension in 1927. It paid a measely twenty dollars a month, and you got it only after passing a humiliating means test.

I’ve been thinking about Mackenzie King and today’s pensions since my visit last week to Kingsmere, his country home in Gatineau Park north of Ottawa.

I drove up on a drizzly day when I had some idle time while on a visit to Ottawa. The clouds cleared as I arrived and I got a good tramp around the ruins that King — a fan of ancient relics — had put up on his estate.

As any student of Canadian politics knows, King was a strange man. A spirituralist, he communed with the dead, including his mother and his dog, Pat.

This encouraged me to take along our dog Morag. She didn’t seem spooked by the ghost of Pat.

Today, we have a more generous Old Age Security pension plus the Canada Pension Plan. And company pensions and private Retirement Savings Plans.

But all is not well in Canada’s pension land. The recession is putting many corporate pensions at risk. It’s generally agreed that Canadians aren’t saving enough. A full-fledged pension crisis is shaping up.

I’m with those who favor increasing the scope of the Canada Pension Plan.  It’s working well but needs bigger contributions by both employers and employees. That way, everyone can  be assured of a living income when they’re no longer of working age.

Of course, the opponents will knock any increase in CPP premiums as a tax increase. What’s wrong with that? We get what we pay for.

The CPP has proven itself to be our most cost-effective pension instrument. Financial institutions eat up too much of our savings in management fees. The CPP doesn’t do that.

Mackenzie King would no doubt find some compromise that would allow him to ease the country into a gradual solution, a bit at a time.

He’s famous for his wartime comment, “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.”

If you’d like to know more about King, I recommend Mackenzie King: Citizenship and Community by John English. (I’m eagerly awaiting the second volume of this author’s Trudeau biography.)

For anyone who has the time, the Mackenzie King Diaries make great reading. You can search by date or keyword by going here.

The King “go slow” sentiment is being echoed today by Michael Ignatieff as he contemplates his situation in Opposition. “An election if necessary, but not necessarily an election.”

But likely with less success!