Group RESPs: The intersection of government support for education savings and securities regulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tax incentives encourage Canadian families to save for their children’s post-secondary education. In recent years, the federal government has created and enhanced incentives aimed specifically at low- to middle-income families. To access these incentives, families must open a ‘registered education savings plan’ (RESP). Approximately one-quarter of RESPs are invested in group plan RESPs. Group plan providers are regulated by securities laws. Group RESPs have a unique and complicated structure, which generates a high number of consumer complaints, particularly about the high, upfront fees. Group plan providers also have a long history of non-compliance with securities laws, including selling group plans to investors for whom they are not suitable. The combination of high, upfront fees and the lack of suitability is particularly harmful to low-income investors. A bad experience with a group RESP may lead the investor to avoid education savings altogether, thereby undermining the government’s policy goals in establishing incentives for low-income families and, ultimately, affecting the future path that may be taken by the potential beneficiaries of such savings. This article examines government incentives for education savings, the terms of group plans and their history of non-compliance, and puts forward three possible avenues for reform, including decoupling incentives aimed specifically at low- and middle-income families from having to open a RESP.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".