WhatFinger


How much taxpayer money was wasted on this unnecessary, badly designed, and heavily staffed and advertised boondoggle

Don't Trust Premier Kathleen Wynne to Reveal the True Cost of the ORPP


By -- Christine Van Geyn, CTF Ontario Director——--June 30, 2016

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This column was published in in the Toronto Sun. The Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) is dead, but Ontario taxpayers are still in the dark about what the cancelled plan cost them. The job-killing and redundant payroll tax was going to cost Ontario employees and employers a combined 3.8 per cent off each employee's pay cheque, cost an arm and a leg to administer, would have done nothing to help low income retirees, and the government's own research found it would cost the province jobs.
While the CPP hike isn't much better, the ORPP is thankfully dead. However, it still cost taxpayers millions. The Premier has said she will disclose the total cost of the scrapped pension scheme, but has provided no timelines for that disclosure. And even when the total cost is revealed, can taxpayers really trust the numbers provided by Premier Wynne and Finance Minister Sousa? Recall that it took a report from the Auditor General to show that the Pan Am Games went over budget by $342 million, even though the government had announced that the games had been under budget, and paid out $5.7 million in bonuses to games executives. And even after the Auditor General released her report, the government still insists the games were under budget. Likewise, the government claimed that they had negotiated "net-zero" contracts with the teachers' unions, and that new benefits to teachers would cost taxpayers nothing. It turned out those net-zero contracts had a not-so net-zero price tag of an additional $300 million. That's for the cost for setting up five health, life and dental trusts, which the government bizarrely claims doesn't figure into the net-zero calculation.

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The government also failed to disclose that it had paid $2.5 million directly to the teachers' unions to cover the teachers' side of the bargaining costs. That cost was only made public because the confidential document was leaked to the media. None of these details or extra costs were disclosed by the government. So whatever the cost of the cancelled ORPP that the government ultimately reveals will need to be independently verified by a third party, like Ontario's Auditor General. Wynne's version of "open and transparent" government thus far has fallen short of any reasonable person's standard of transparency. Presumably the government will need to admit that they spent money--and continue to spend money today--on the fifty staff members at the ORPP Administrative Corporation. That includes the $525,000 salary for former Pan Am Games CEO Saad Rafi, as well as a 25 per cent discretionary bonus. Taxpayers don't know if he received a severance package or not. The Administrative Corporation had a $14 million budget for 2015-16, and a further $1.5 million for 2016-17. The government will also face pressure to disclose the cost of advertising the plan. Premier Wynne spent almost $1.7 million advertising the plan in the months leading up to the federal election, and more ads have since been created and have continued to run.

But will the cost released by the government include the many public servants who worked on the ORPP over the past two and a half years, or in the lead up to the proposal in the 2014 budget? Will the cost of the cancelled ORPP include the creation of a new portfolio for an Associate Minister of Finance for the ORPP, and her new $165,750 salary? And what about the accompanying staff for that minister's office? What about government commissioned polling, research, and external consultants, which can cost further millions? Will the government include these costs in the tally of ORPP expenses? Or will Wynn claim, like she did with the Pan Am Games, that they were a part of the expenses of other departments, programs, or the general business of government? Ultimately, the only way taxpayers will know exactly how much of their money was wasted on this unnecessary, badly designed, and heavily staffed and advertised boondoggle will be if the Auditor General looks into the matter. Let's hope she has that opportunity.


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Canadian Taxpayers Federation -- Christine Van Geyn, CTF Ontario Director -- Bio and Archives

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