Dear Editor
I'm not surprised that the propagandists of the Frasier Institute should find fault with the idea that public pension plans are more generous than most private pension plans, but I was surprised to note, in the Oct. 1 issue of the News-Optimist, that Mark Milke, a Senior Fellow of the Frasier Institute, wrote ("Controlling soaring public sector costs") that the NDP had actually done something good about that back in 1977. Evidently, the "good" thing Allen Blakeney's government had done was to switch the government pension plan from a "defined benefit" plan to a "defined contribution" plan, which, I suppose, gets the government out from under if the plan goes sour. Maybe so.
But Milke spent a lot of ink, before lauding Allen Blakeney, just bemoaning the fact that most government pension plans are more generous than most private pension plans, and that the difference has been growing for a long time in favour of the government plans. He is probably right about that, too, but not because government pension plans are getting more generous. Rather, it seems clear to me that the difference lies in the fact that private plans are becoming less generous faster than public ones. I would suggest that one reason for that would be that conservative governments - especially our federal government under Stephen Harper - have been making it more and more difficult for labour unions to be effective, and have been most successful in doing that in the private sector.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
