Public Sector Pensions: Options for Reform from the Saskatchewan NDP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2011, just over six million Canadians were enrolled in some type of registered pension plan (RPP). In the public sector, 87.1% of employees were covered by an RPP — up from 75.5% in 1978. In the private sector, just 24.4% of employees were enrolled in an RPP in 2011, down from 35.2% in 1978.In 1974, of those enrolled in a registered pension plan, 98.8% of public sector workers were in a defined benefit plan, which had decreased 94.0% by 2011. In the private sector, 88.0% of private sector workers were in a defined benefit plan in 1974 but that declined to 52.3% by 2011. In the private sector, significant growth has occurred in defined contribution and “other” registered plans.Actuarial assumptions about major provincial public sector pension plans have been too optimistic, which has had consequences for public treasuries. In fact, increased contribution rates and/or bailouts for public sector pension plans have been the norm among the major plans, not the exception. Since the year 2000, taxpayers have seen repeated increases in the contribution rates to public sector pension plans, this to ameliorate pension fund shortfalls. In addition, taxpayers have also been required to bail out the public sector pension plans through special payments.Given the tight connection between the cost of public sector pension plans and the public treasury — and thus to taxpayers, one notable Canadian-made option for reform comes from Saskatchewan. There, the province stopped adding to pension liabilities and did so over three decades ago. The NDP’s 1970s-era reforms can serve as a useful model for long-term reform to any government, provincial or federal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".