Is expanding CPP best solution to "retirement crisis"?

The ongoing debate about improving Canada's pension system -- in response to what has been called a retirement income crisis -- continues with recent remarks by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. At recent Ontario Liberal party events last week Wynne chided Prime Minister Stephen Harper for refusing to strengthen the Canada Pension Plan as a means to ensuring middle-class Canadians have adequate retirement income.
The prime minister is showing "willful and ideological indifference to the retirement income crisis," according to Wynne.
"It's somewhere between offensive and inexplicable to ask that people who have worked hard all their lives to be rewarded with a retirement that takes them out of the middle class."
Wynne said a pension income crisis has developed as a result of a decline in company pension plans along with a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans. Expansion of the CPP would solve the problem.
"But Stephen Harper has an ideological has an ideological aversion to the CPP, so there is no federal leadership in this area."
As a result, Ontario is working on its own plan to enhance retirement income. Prince Edward Island and Manitoba are also looking at options. Alberta's government has rejected CPP enhancement and is not currently projecting its own pension scheme.
The adequacy of the current retirement income system, the desirability of expanding CPP and other possible options are also the subject of three recent reports that come to differing conclusions.
The country's retirement income system is failing Canadians, states a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
In Risky Business: Canada's Retirement Income System, author Hugh Mackenzie strongly criticizes RRSPs as a retirement savings vehicle because of their high fees, lower returns and the fact they are mainly utilized by higher income earners. The Pooled Registered Pension Plans (PRPPs) introduced by the federal government suffer from the same defects, he says.
Mackenzie says that expanding the CPP would be the best way to provide for retirement income because management costs are lower, longevity risk is taken care of and better returns can be generated.
"The Canada and Quebec pension plans are among the largest and most successful pension plans in the world," MacKenzie has said. "That is not cause for complacency, but it is an opportunity. The next phase of pension reform must build further on that solid foundation."
Risky Business: Canada's Retirement Income System is available on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives website: http://policy alternatives.ca.
A report from the C.D. Howe institute that particularly addresses the Ontario situation recommends a so-called "middle way" between CPP expansion and reliance on PRPPs.
Author Keith Ambachtsheer notes there is general agreement that Canada has a pension coverage problem. However he does not favour CPP expansion (also referred to as "Big CPP") because it would be mandatory and future generations might be required to fund pension payouts if assumptions about invest returns are too optimistic.
His solution, based on a nation-wide proposal he made in 2008,  is a supplementary pension plan that employers would have to provide, while allowing workers would be to opt out. Rather than a definite pension income, plan members would have a pension "target," with actual payments varying on the basis of investment results.
The report,  Helping Ontarians Save for Retirement: How the Province Could Adapt the Canada Supplementary Pension Plan, is available at www.cdhowe.org.
In a paper published by the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, authors Kevin Milligan and Tammy Schirle examine four proposals for increasing retirement income.
They indicate that common plans to expand CPP would likely not benefit individuals making less than $50,000 annually because reductions in Guaranteed Income Supplement payments.
Their proposal is to double the cap on the maximum income covered by CPP from $51,000 to $102,000, which they argue would achieve the desired result without undue complexity.
The authors raise the question of whether retirement income shortfalls faced by relatively of well-off Canadians are really a question the government needs to deal with. However their conclusion suggests that it is.
"Decisions about saving are complicated, irreversible and vitally important," they state. "Leaving people to make these decisions on their own will result in some proportion of the population  choosing poorly and ending up in a dire position in their last years. If government has some responsibility for alleviating personal decision-making failures, a modest expansion to the CPP might be justified on those grounds."
The report, Simulated Replacement Rates for CPP Reform Options, can be found at www.policyschool.ucalgary.ca.

Seniors' care faulted in throne speech responses

Not a lot was said about seniors in the Alberta government's speech from the throne earlier this week. In the speech given by Lieutenant-Governor Donald S. Ethell at the March 3 opening of the second session of 28th Alberta Legislature, the government congratulated itself for building a seniors' care home in Strathmore.
It also stated the government will "invest in better seniors' care, focusing funding on aging in place and on innovative new technology that allows patients to recover in their own homes," and said Crown land may be made available for new continuing care centres.
However, in their responses to the throne speech in the legislature, several members of the opposition parties had plenty to say, honing in on current deficiencies and setting out how they would do it better.
"Well we don't have to look back on what's happening to the seniors in our province or some of the horrible, horrible things that we've seen," said Heather Forsyth, Wildrose MLA for Calgary-Fish Creek. "The government doesn't seem to understand that the fact of the matter is is that while we appreciate what they're doing in continuing care spaces, we have seniors in this province that need to be in long-term care nursing beds."
Forsyth noted that people such as Dr. Paul Parks had frequently spoken out about the need for building long-term care nursing beds because not everyone fits into the continuing care model.
"I saw that with my own mom, who was in a continuing care facility and ended up in the hospital," she said.
The MLA for Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre, Joe Anglin, also a Wildrose member, said he sees significant issues with the long-term care facility in Rocky Mountain House. Anglin pointed to understaffing that has resulted in residents being served cold food and not even being able to get the two meals a week to which they are entitled.
"What's happening here -- and to a T every one of the front-line healthcare workers in this long-term care facility…will testify that this now is an extreme example, and it's a critical situation, where proper care is not  being delivered," he said.
"The cutbacks have been too great," Anglin went on. "We have an imbalance in the system. I wish Rocky Mountain House was the only place, but it's not. We're seeing it elsewhere, in other places in the province, and this is a real issue that affects us."
As a result of government actions, increased healthcare costs are putting a strain on seniors and their families stated David Eggen, NDP MLA for Edmonton-Calder.
"We've somehow moved it out of the provincial budget, and so many more people are having to pay for care for seniors with assisted living and so forth. That price, that burden, is often more than families can afford.
Eggen believes however that care for seniors is not a drastic problem for society.
"We knew that the baby boom would be passing through our demographic for the last 50 years," he said. "It's arrived now, and with planning and with care we can build the public seniors' care that we require for these next number of years."
Seniors would benefit from major investments in healthcare under a New Democrat government, said party leader Brian Mason, MLA for Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood.
He said a plan for the $1 billion extra in federal health transfers Alberta will begin receiving next year would see the government investing in long-term care and home care and reducing prescription drug costs for seniors, along with supporting mental health care, and expanding medical and nursing programs.
According to Liberal leader Raj Sherman, Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA, a government he headed would bring in world-class home care, nonprofit community home care and lodge care and world-class nonprofit community-based long-term care.
"Alberta Liberals will bring in a drug plan so that seniors can afford their drugs, unlike the government who wants to bring in a drug plan that's a tax on the sick," he added. "If seniors can afford to get their get their drugs, they will actually stay out of the hospital system. We know this investment in a drug plan will improve their lives and save us money in the acute-care system."

Relatives denounce long-term care visit bans

The banning of relatives and others from visiting residents in long-term care facilities was denounced yesterday by a number of people affected by this management practice.
Shauna McHarg, Hugette Hebert and and Dennis Dupuis have all been temporarily or permanently banned from visiting relatives in Alberta facilities. They told their stories at an Edmonton press conference organized by Public Interest Alberta, which is calling on the provincial government to stop facilities from banning people from seeing their loved ones without due process.
Also on hand was Ruth Adria of the Elder Advocates of Alberta who has been banned from a number of facilities after bing asked by families to look into concerns about quality of care or abuse.
The issue was first brought into the public eye in an article I wrote for the December issue of the Edmonton Senior newspaper on Shauna McHarg's lengthy struggle to get more access to her parents, residents on separate wards at the Edmonton General Continuing Care Centre operated by Covenant Health.
McHarg is restricted to seeing her mother one hour a day five days a week, and has no chance to see her father. She has also been banned from visiting friends she made among the residents, including the late Beverly Munro, who had been vocal about her own complaints against the facility.
Covenant Health management figures upheld the restrictions against McHarg, but would not tell her why. This prompted her to seek help from the health minister, the Alberta ombudsman, the Health Quality Council of Alberta and the Alberta Health Services patient concerns officer, and eventually file a Freedom of Information and Privacy (FOIP) request.
The whole rigamarole has produced some partial victories, and one aspect is now being looked at by a judge, but her experience has mainly been one of buck passing and denial of ability to act.
"My goal is to see my parents," she told me. "Despite following the process I've been told to follow and spending three years doing it, there's no solution. It doesn't seem like Covenant Health is accountable to anyone."
While Huguette Hebert was also banned from a Covenant Health facility, Daniel Dupuis has faced a month-long ban at the St. Therese Health Centre in St. Paul, where his 101-year-old mother lives.
"I have complied with all the restrictions they have placed on me over the past two years, yet there is no process in place where I can challenge these restrictions that allow me to visit my mother just one hour a day," he said. "How is this possible in Canada?"
Because she wanted to stay in her husband's room when he was being changed, to see if there were any pressure sores, Hebert was banned for a day and told that if she didn't cooperate she could be banned forever from seeing her husband.
"Now the CEO of Covenant Health has the audacity to say that the only reason they ban people is to protect patients or staff," said Hebert."Well, I think the reason they are abusing their power by banning people is to protect their own bottoms."
If health facility operators such as Covenant Health currently have policies on banning set out, they should be made public. If they do not have well-defined and reasonable policies, the policies should be developed. There also should be a process of appeal of any bannings and undue restrictions to an authority that can determine their legitimacy and compel redress if necessary.
The alternative may be a legal battle.
"If the government is not willing to act to empower families with real due process, then we will explore taking legal action to represent the rights of these families to be together," said Bill Moore-Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta. The  organization is asking people who have people who have banned or threatened with banning to get in touch with them with a view to the possibility of joint legal action.

U of A nursing faculty joins gerontological excellence body

The University of Alberta faculty of nursing has joined the National Hartford Centers of Gerontological Nursing Excellence (NHCGNE), the first school outside the U.S. to do so.

The organization’s mission is to enhance and sustain the capacity and competency of nurses to provide quality care to older adults through faculty development, advancing gerontological nursing science, facilitating adoption of best practices, fostering leadership, and designing and shaping policy.

To be invited to join, schools of nursing must have demonstrated a commitment to gerontological nursing and share a vision of optimal health and quality of life for older adults.

“It is exciting that our expertise has been acknowledged internationally by the NHCGNE,” said Dr. Anita Molzahn, dean of the nursing faculty. “As one of the leading research-intensive nursing faculties in Canada, we have a strong cohort of researchers interested in aging and gerontological nursing.

“With 25 per cent of our faculty members -- many of whom are leading scholars -- focusing their research and scholarship primarily on care of older adults, this partnership will facilitate future research activity and faculty development relating to gerontological nursing.”

The main goals of the National Hartford Centers of Gerontological Excellence are to increase the cadre of academic geriatric nurses, build leadership capacity in academic geriatric nurses, and build national collaboration and excitement about geriatric/gerontological nursing.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the organization was started in 2000 with support from the John A. Hartford Foundation, and subsequently attracted additional funding partners in the Atlantic Philanthropies and Mayday Fund.

These institutions have invested over $80 million in national efforts to build academic gerontological nursing capacity through their support. The program has supported more than 200 pre-doctoral and postdoctoral nursing scholars who have stimulated excitement about the field among nursing students and practicing nurses. They are the leaders who will shape future care for older persons.

The John A. Hartford Foundation is a private philanthropy working to improve the health of older people established by in 1929. John A. Hartford and his brother, George L. Hartford, both former chief executives of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (the A&P grocery chain), left the bulk of their estates to the foundation when they died in the 1950s.

Today the foundation seeks to put geriatrics expertise to work in all health care settings by advancing practice change and innovation, supporting team-based care through interdisciplinary education of all health care providers, supporting policies and regulations that promote better care, and developing and disseminating new evidence-based models that deliver better, more cost-effective health care.

Effort needed to improve Aboriginal seniors health: report

Governments must make a greater effort to collaborate to improve health care for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis seniors, according to a new report by the Health Council of Canada.

The report, Canada’s most vulnerable: Improving health care for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis seniors, concludes they often do not receive the same level of health care as non-Aboriginal Canadians because of poor communication, collaboration, and disputes between governments about who is responsible for the care of Aboriginal people.

“Aboriginal seniors have more complex health needs than other Canadian seniors, but they often don’t receive the same level of care,” said Dr. Catherine Cook, a councillor with the Health Council of Canada who is Métis. 

According to 2011 Statistics Canada, there were 82,690 Aboriginal people in Canada aged 65 and over, accounting for 5.9 per cent of the total Aboriginal population. This compares to the 14.2 per cent of seniors in the non-Aboriginal population.

In 2011 in Alberta, there were 220,695 Aboriginal people, representing 15.8 per cent of the total Aboriginal population of Canada. About four per cent are aged 65 and over.

In comparison to the larger Canadian population, a significantly higher proportion of Aboriginal seniors live on low incomes and in poor health, with multiple chronic conditions and disabilities, the report points out.

Many are in poorer physical and mental health due to the disruption to their way of life caused by colonization, particularly the intergenerational impacts and trauma of the residential school experience.

These health needs are magnified by poverty, poor housing, racism, language barriers, and cultural differences.

Despite this, little attention has been paid to date to the health care needs of Aboriginal seniors in either research or public policy, the report states.

Home care for First Nations seniors on reserve is one example it discusses.

“In some provinces, there can be quite a discrepancy between the level of care available to First Nations seniors on reserve, and what is available to seniors in the rest of the province,” said Cook. “At the same time, some provinces have inadvertently caused more pressure for on-reserve home care programs by creating policies that send people home earlier from the hospital.”

 The Health Council’s report looks at developments from across Canada in which governments, health regions, and Aboriginal communities have formed partnerships to improve health care for Aboriginal seniors and other Aboriginal people.

“The ground-breaking transfer of health authority to the new First Nations Health Authority in BC is the highest profile example of this type of partnership,” says John G. Abbott, CEO of the Health Council of Canada. “We heard about many emerging partnerships at a local or regional level, where people were surveying Aboriginal seniors to find out their needs, and working together to make improvements,” added Abbott.

The purpose of this report, he noted, is to give governments, regional health authorities, and health care providers a better understanding of the problems faced by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis seniors, and to provide them with examples of how they can do things differently.

The report is at www. healthcouncilcanada.ca/improvinghealthcare.

Alberta Health care coverage extended for snowbirds

Albertans in who head off to find the sun winter can now extend their stay an extra month while maintaining health care coverage. 

Associate Minister of Seniors, Dave Quest, announced the change this morning at Calgary International Airport.

Snowbirds and other long-term vacationers can now be out of Alberta up to 212 days (seven months) a year while keeping their eligibility for Alberta health care insurance coverage. This is a 30-day increase from the previous 182-day limit (six months).

“We want Albertans to have the flexibility to go on extended vacations while having the peace of mind that their health care coverage is there for them if they need it,” said Quest.

Increasing the amount of time longer-term vacationers are permitted out of the province allows Alberta residents to remain eligible for health coverage as long as they have not established permanent residence elsewhere.  

The increase brings Alberta into line with other Canadian provinces, including British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba. Newfoundlanders remain eligible for coverage for 240 days.

The new policy comes into effect immediately, and includes travelers who are already outside of the province.

“This is welcome news for our members who told us they wanted the option to visit other countries for several months at a time, without sacrificing their health care coverage,” said Michael MacKenzie, executive director of the Canadian Snowbird Association.

“Extending coverage for an extra month gives travelers more flexibility.” 

Albertans who plan to be out of the province for extended periods need to contact Alberta Health each year before leaving, to ensure their health care coverage remains current.