Reform of Retirement Income Policy: International and Canadian Perspectives

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada and Global Spin: Probing the Globalization
Debate, and the co-author of Toronto Women.

All those with any professional interest in the current public policy
debate on the fate of the Canada and Quebec pension plans—established
in the halcyon days of the 1960s—will want to have a copy of this
volume on their bookshelves. Its origins lie in papers presented at an
academic conference convened by the School of Policy Studies at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The 22 expert contributors
include many of the usual Canadian suspects: Ken Battle from the Caledon
Institute, the ubiquitous Thomas Courchene, William Robson from the C.D.
Howe Institute, and Monica Townson from the Canada Pension Plan Advisory
Board. To help add some international perspective to the discussion,
there are also voices from London (England), the World Bank in
Washington, Harvard University, and Florida State University. Some
papers are more distinguished (and/or interesting) than others, but all
the contributors acquit themselves credibly and in various ways that
illuminate the issues at stake.

As the editors note, even though the current “cycle of pension
politics” in Canada during the late 1990s is likely to generate “far
more substantial changes” than those that flowed from the somewhat
parallel debates of the early 1980s, the present controversies have
prompted “a much more limited contribution from the research
community.” This may make Reform of Retirement Income Policy all the
more valuable, but it does not seem all that hard to understand. During
the 30-year period that followed World War II, countries like Canada
seemed wealthy enough to afford almost anything. In the 1990s (unlike
even the early 1980s), almost everyone seems to think that we will never
be quite that wealthy again. The tables, graphs, and mathematical
formulas in this book leave much the same impression. Whatever exactly
happens, younger people today are no doubt well advised to believe that
they will not be able to count quite so much on governments to look
after them in their old age.