Letter from National Trust Pension Surplus Challengers

December 19, 2001

Mr. John R. O’Toole, MPP
Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Finance
Ontario Ministry of Finance
7 Queen’s Park Crescent, 7th Floor
Toronto, ON M7A 1Y7

Dear Mr. O’Toole:

Re: Proposed Amendments to the Pension Benefits Act (Ontario)

On behalf of all AFTER members, I would like to thank you, and your assistant, Derron Bain, for taking time to meet with Tim O’Shea, Ed O’Brien, Don Malcolm and myself last Wednesday, December 12th to discuss our position on the amendments to the Pension Benefits Act (Ontario) proposed by your Government.

We appreciate that your task is made difficult by the fact that pension legislation is somewhat complicated, and the PBA (Ontario) must consider Federal pension and Income Tax requirements as well. However, we believe the matter can, and should, be simplified if one accepts that pension plans are trusts created solely for the benefit of employees and are not to be used by corporations / their executives as profit centres & / or bonus schemes.

If both employer and employees pay into a plan, one could argue that any plan surplus should be shared by both. When only employees pay into their plan, the case for the employer removing surplus, or otherwise unilaterally benefiting from that surplus to the exclusion of the employees, disappears. This is precisely the situation with Scotiabank and the Pension Plan for Former Employees of National Trust. As this is totally unfair, inequitable and unacceptable to so many individuals, we need your help and intervention to ensure this situation does not continue.

We remind you that your Government has an opportunity to do the “right thing” for working constituents throughout Ontario, and proper action by the Ministry won’t require a new socially-funded program or an injection of taxpayer dollars for which you can be criticized.

We reiterate our offer to again meet with you or anyone else you feel might benefit from our balanced input. Meanwhile, we would appreciate receiving the outstanding information we requested under the Freedom of Information process which you undertook to provide.

Yours truly,

Association For The Equitable Recovery
of The National Trust Pension Surplus



Stuart J. Galbraith
Negotiating Committee Member (Tel.: 905-820-3887)

c.c. Robert M. Smallhorn (Tel.: 905-842-1505)