Firefighters, administrative and infrastructure maintenance personnel at the Saint John Airport are among the newest members to join the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology pension plan’s DBplus. As part of a new collective agreement that was ratified earlier this year, the employees, who are represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, have joined […]
Canada’s 11 largest pension funds should be able to maintain their current credit ratings through ongoing market turmoil, according to Fitch Ratings Inc. Nevertheless, return expectations are under significant pressure from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, said the ratings agency in a new report. “Fund performance will depend on asset mix, which is largely […]
The coronavirus crisis may be a signal for some pension plan sponsors that it’s time to revisit their appetite for risk. A typical asset-liability study involves stochastic modelling to project thousands of future economic scenarios and see how a pension plan would react under those scenarios, says Dean Newell, vice-president at Actuarial Solutions Inc. Particularly, the […]
As private equity investments become all the more commonplace in pension fund portfolios, is the asset class really worth it? According to a paper by Ludovic Phalippou, professor of financial economics at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, private equity funds have failed to outperform equities over a 10-year period. But the real catch is […]
New draft regulations from the federal government would allow registered pension plans to borrow money and extend the deadline to retroactively credit pensionable service under a defined benefit plan in a bid to help plan sponsors maintain their pensions through the coronavirus pandemic. As part of the government’s coronavirus economic response plan, the regulations would apply to employers […]
In the second quarter of 2020, the funded positions of defined benefit plans recovered almost half of the losses incurred during the coronavirus crash of the first quarter, according to Mercer’s pension health index. The index, which represents the solvency ratio of a hypothetical DB pension plan, increased to 101 per cent at the end […]
Nova Scotia’s Public Service Superannuation Plan reported a 98.5 per cent funded status as of Dec. 31, 2019 and said it will halt cost-of-living adjustments for retirees for the next five years. According to the plan’s 2020 funded health review, its funding policy prohibits indexing when the PSSP’s funded status is below 100 per cent. However, the Public Service Superannuation […]
More than 80 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 are prepared for retirement and the vast majority have a high probability of being prepared, according to a new report by business school HEC Montréal’s Retirement and Savings Institute with funding from the Global Risk Institute. The report, which analyzed the results of a […]
Before physical distancing, pension plan sponsors typically held in-person meetings and site visits when allocating to new investment managers. “I like to look people in the eye when they’re telling me what they’re going to do,” says Blair Richards, chief executive officer of the Halifax Port ILA/HEA Pension Plan. “It’s very old school and it’s […]
Morneau Shepell Ltd. is appointing Glen Oikawa as a client relationship partner, retirement solutions partner and Calgary office leader. In the new role, he’ll focus on delivering innovation, thought leadership and dedicated service to several of the organization’s largest plan sponsor clients across Western Canada. With more than 20 years of experience in financial well-being, […]