Pension Pulse

Bob Baldwin, a former director of PSP Investments who runs Baldwin Consulting and is a director at Addenda Capital, sent me an important paper, DB and Pension Design: Reflections on Risks and Reporting : Over the forty years that I have served as a pension specialist inside the trade union movement and outside of it since 2005, debates about the relative merits of defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) pension plans have been a prominent part of pension discourse. The intensity of the debate has ebbed and flowed over the years but has been more intense in recent years as there has been a shift from DB to DC plans that has been particularly notable in workplace pension plans (WPPs) in the UK and US and to a lesser but clear degree in Canada as well. This shift has been much stronger in the private sector compared to the public sector and includes a shift from registered DC plans to group RRSPs (See: Appendix 1 and Baldwin, 2015). This shift has left the remaining membe...

Earlier this month, CDPQ's Kim Thomassin and OTPP's Barbara Zvan wrote a comment for Benefits Canada on why it's time for sustainable finance to go mainstream: As members of the federal government’s expert panel on sustainable finance, we recently published our final report on how to mobilize Canada’s financial sector in the transition to a low-carbon, climate-smart economy. Our recommendations seek to connect the dots between Canada’s climate objectives, its economic ambitions and its investment imperatives. At its essence, if Canada is to meet its long-term environmental and economic objectives, sustainable finance needs to go mainstream. As stewards of Canadians’ retirement and long-term savings, our role is to promote stability and sustainability. This entails designing portfolios that will respond to evolving climate risks and profiting from new clean growth opportunities over time. Yet, as a whole, climate change remains a fuzzy notion in asset management. W...