Hi Folks:
This is a Christmas Letter sent to Dalton.
Maybe You would also like to send one and ask Dalton to think of the Seniors in the New Year instead of acting like Mister Scrooge.
Merry Christmas And a Prosperous New Year Regards Bill Costello.
Hon Dalton McGuinty dmcguinty.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org Premier
Hon Dwight Duncan dduncan.mpp@liberal.ola.org Minister of Finance
Hon Aileen Carroll carrollaileen@yahoo.ca Minister Responsible for Seniors
Good morning Mr. McGuinty,
Once again it is Christmas time and once again it is time to remind you of the plight of seniors who hold Locked-In pensions.
The Legislative Hansard reveals that on December 15, 1999 you asked the following question of then Finance Minister Ernie Eves.
"My question is for the Minister of Finance. Minister, with reference to Bill 27, we have discovered deep down inside a delightful Christmas gift that you intend to give to a select group of MPPs in this Legislature.
I want to make it perfectly clear in this House today that I and my party will have none of it. Your special provision says that MPPs are going to have special access to their pension funds.
You're going to give a right to MPPs that none of the other 11 million Ontarians are going to be able to enjoy.
Your new bill will allow some of our MPPs to have instant access to their pension plan at age 55 when you're going to give no other Ontarian that said same right.
Minister, how can you possibly justify this double standard?" Bill 27 to which you referred was called An Act To Amend The Pension Benefits Act And The MPPs Pension Act. It received Royal Assent on December 22, 1999.Despite you personally having voted against Bill 27, as did other members of your Liberal party, your words of December 15th 1999, ...
"I and my party will have none of it" ... have proven to be totally false.In fact, just the opposite has turned out to be the REAL truth.
There were members from your own Liberal party who received extraordinary financial gain with respect to their pensions, despite having voted against Bill 27.
Further, the person who received the most financial gain was none other than your former Liberal colleague, Mr. Sean Conway.
Mr. Conway's own words from the Legislative Hansard for December 13, 1999 were ... "Make no mistake about it: Some of us, with names like Conway, Harris, Eves, Sterling, Runciman, are very substantially advantaged by a portion of this bill, and it is wrong that we should be so advantaged. ........... What we have here today, I say to my friends, in one particular respect is another sweetheart deal for a few members of this Legislature named Harris, Eves, Conway, among others. I want to make it plain. No one benefits more from this change than I do. It's a wrong thing for me to support. I would go even further and say it's immoral."
Today, Mr. Conway has unfettered access to over $1 million of pension money that had previously been designated as Locked-In pension money.
Yet he said such exclusive privilege was both wrong and immoral.
Now, let us fast forward to Christmas 2006.As reported in the CTV article of December 21, 2006, you Mr. McGuinty, were initially opposed to the magnanimous pay raise that was being proposed for MPPs.
However upon the final vote being taken, you ended up being a major recipient of this magnanimous pay raise.
Once again, MPPs, including yourself, received extraordinary financial gain just before Christmas.
Once again too, you have profited from gains achieved, in some measure, on the backs of seniors who hold Locked-In pensions.
Where certain special MPPs in 1999 received unfettered access to their pension monies at age 55, monies that had been accrued entirely from within a defined benefit plan called the infamous MPPs gold-plated pension plan, you now have had the audacity to allow seniors unfettered access to only 25% of their pension money, with the full access being delayed until age 90. As you well know, most seniors will not be alive at age 90 and as such will forfeit much of their hard-earned pension monies to the government in the form of estate taxes.
Yet your fellow Liberal colleagues such as Jim Bradley, Sean Conway, Elinor Caplan and Tony Ruprecht, and the list goes on, who also may not be alive at age 90, get 100% unfettered pension access at age 55 and thus are able to enjoy their pension monies while still living.
It is these forfeited pension monies that are paying a portion of your magnanimous pay raise.Also, the CTV article below makes reference to the fact the MPPs no longer have a pension plan.
Such information from MPPs is flat-out deception of the public through semantics. Each MPP does have a pension plan. It is called an RRSP plan to which they now have unfettered access.
What each MPP no longer has though, is membership in the former MPPs gold-plated defined benefit pension plan.
Under relentless pressure from the public because of the inordinate pension benefits that politicians had bestowed upon themselves over the years, this plan was dissolved in 1995.
The 10 per-cent of earnings that is now being contributed to each MPP's RRSP plan is in part coming from seniors who own Locked-In pensions.
These are the same people Mr. McGuinty, to whom you refuse to extend unfettered pension access privileges.
Mr. McGuinty, as you attend the Christmas recital at the school where your wife teaches, look around the room and see the number of grandparents that are there proudly supporting their grandchildren's efforts.
Some of these grandparents own Locked-In pensions and as such are unable to enjoy the quality of life during their golden years that they deserve.
Why? The answer is quite simple. You are denying them unfettered access to their own hard-earned pension monies while they are living. Yet at the same time you demand that they pay for your magnanimous pay raises and your rich pension buyouts of 1999.
Your recent announcement of a national holiday in February is nothing but another example of a cruel shell game perpetrated in part against seniors.
Everything costs, including your new holiday announcement and for sure it will be seniors with Locked-In pensions who will once again be asked to dig a little deeper.
Why is a lock on one's financial assets, especially seniors, only acceptable for ordinary Ontarians but not acceptable for you Mr. McGuinty?
As we await your Christmas message and hope upon hope that you don't find another way to award yourself another delightful Christmas gift, will you answer your own question as it relates to Locked-In pensions ... that is the question you asked of Mr. Eves back in 1999 that is still waiting for an honest answer today?"
How can you possibly justify this double standard?
I, along with hundreds of thousands of other seniors, await your answer.
Kenneth Elliott
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