The first General Meeting has been set for October 5, 2004 at 2 o’clock.
The meeting should run between one and one and a half hours. The meeting will be held at:
25 Old York Mills Rd.
Toronto, Ont
M2P 1B5
The church is within walking distance of the York Mills Subway stop at Yonge and Wilson/York Mills. To get to the church walk one block east of Yonge on York Mills. Then turn south on Old York Mills St. and it is a very short block to the church, which is on the west side. Please mark your calendars and RSVP if you plan to attend. An agenda will follow later but the primary purpose of the meeting is to update everyone on all developments regarding the pension plan and to elect a slate of officers whose responsibility will be to move the process forward with Canada Life/Great West Life/Power Corp.
As of July 2004 the membership is approaching 350. To date the only form of communication is via the Internet and this will continue in the foreseeable future. We do know however, that there are a number of individuals who receive hardcopy from other members with access to the Internet and we are interested in adding these individual to the list. If you are providing hard copy to someone we would appreciate e-mail to clpens@trigger.net indicating the person who you are providing hard copy and his/her relationship to Canada Life and the pension plan. If there is any concern regarding confidentially please also indicate this and the group will insure that they are not listed in the roster by name.
We must hang together or end up hanging together.
FINANCIAL SERVICES COMMISION OF ONTARIO (FSCO)
Representatives of the Members’ Rights Group met with FSCO on March 15, 2004. The discussions were informative and useful. After the meeting FSCO requested a letter from the Group outlining the assistance required. A letter was sent on June 1, 2004 outlining 4 issues that are areas of concern and which the Right’s Group is seeking assistance in clarifying. The 4 issues are outlined in Newsletter 13. A reply was received from FSCO on June 24th.
In the letter FCSO indicated that they had written directly to the pension plan administrator of the Canada Life Pension Plan requesting further information regarding 2 issues. Once clarification on the outstanding issues is received FCSO will provide comments on all 4 issues raised in the June 1st letter. We will continue to advise you of developments in future newsletters.
During the course of the preparation of the newsletters we get correspondence from many of the active members. If you have something that may be of interest to the group please e-mail your comments to clpens@trigger.net.
“The website www.CommutedValues.com was developed to help address issues related to the establishment of government requirements for determining commuted values, but it has now updated to also include a separate section for links and a rough checklist that may be helpful to individuals faced with making a personal decision between a commuted value and a deferred pension. The circumstances in a windup situation would be somewhat different (depending what options are presented particularly with regards to the indexing features), but the information may be useful for benchmark considerations.” A link to this website has been set up in www.trigger.net/~clpens.
It’s A Mystery !!
Our Canada Life Canadian Pension Plan Members’ Rights Group was set up about 4 years ago and has accomplished several significant things for all members of the Plan. If you check the website, you will see the amount of work and effort that has been expended to help protect our rights and our pensions.
Although the need for a larger group has been mentioned in the newsletters, there seems to be no sense of urgency in our membership. Our number is growing slowly and now sits around the 350 mark, but the legal firm we have consulted recommends that we raise our membership to at least 1000 as quickly as possible, in order to strengthen our group for any class action we may need to initiate.
I know that sending this in a newsletter is “preaching to the converted”, but why are so many of the pension plan members unaware or uninterested in joining and helping to protect their rights? It’s a Mystery !!
Not too long ago, there was a Company called The Canada Life Assurance Company. This company was very paternalistic, treated its employees fairly, and had excellent benefit plans. A few years ago this Company changed and became more interested in the bottom line. Benefit plans were reduced, and the pension plan was changed to no longer provide indexing for members joining the plan after 2000.
Then came demutualization, and voting of generous stock options to executives who subsequently sold the company. The buyer was Power Corporation through its insurance arm, led by Great West Life. If money is their object, a very real possibility is that they will try to drain the surplus from the Canada Life pension plan. If we allow them to do so, it could put our pensions in jeopardy if a few bad years are experienced in the equity markets.
We have all read about the number of companies whose pension plans are under-funded and where the companies are considering cutting back the pension benefits.
Why are we trusting that this situation could never arise at Canada Life? Do we think Canada Life will protect us? Canada Life exists in name only. The new owners are reducing staff every month in large numbers. Within two years, we would not be surprised if everyone will be gone.
As benefit plans are reduced in the near future, who is going to help you to fight for your rights?
How Has the Canada Life Rights Group Helped?
Since its inception, we have continually visited the offices of the Financial Services Commission of Ontario to monitor the actions being taken by the Company. We will continue to do so, and inform our members of changes being registered by the Company.
In 2002 we discovered that the company was attempting to transfer surplus from the fund on behalf of previous members of the Canada Life Casualty Company. Although this transfer was acceptable, they were attempting the transfer under a clause that stated “that they had total ownership of the surplus in the Pension Plan.” We challenged their ownership of the plan surplus, and the Company subsequently changed its application to apply under the clause that stated the “ownership of the surplus is uncertain.”
As a result, the precedent has been set that the surplus ownership must be determined before the Company can claim any part of it.
We have enlisted the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO) to help us with:
- Reviewing the Trust Deeds and Plan Documents to establish the FSCO position on ownership of the surplus, which court cases would seem to support.
- Questioning the validity of an amendment to the Trust Deed that purported to give the Company the unilateral right to amend the plan or wind it up and take the surplus.
- Establishing lines of communication with the Plan Administrator and the Trustees that have been denied to us.
- Determining what is required in establishing an Advisory Committee of plan members.
- Challenging the change to the original Trust Deed that allowed the Company to charge expenses to the Plan, (and thereby reduce the surplus by more than $35 Million since 1994.)
- Requesting an explanation of the discrepancy between the level of expenses and their explanation in the Financial Statement notes.
How Can You Help?
Although the Financial statements on the fund for 2003 have not been published yet, we expect the surplus in the fund should be approximately. $260 Million.
We also expect that Power Corporation/Great-West Life will not give this up without a fight, and will do everything it can to claim it.
I urge you to contact everyone you know who is a Plan Member and enlist him or her to join our Group. The time to join is now.
When the need to act in opposition arises, it will be far too late to begin recruiting.
Wib Antler
Gary Nummelin
Phil Davy
NOTE: Previous newsletters are available on our website. The Group’s website is www.trigger.net/~clpens/. If you have received this newsletter by mistake, or if you wish to be removed from the mailing list, please send an e-mail to clpens@trigger.net with the subject of “Unsubscribe”. If you have information or opinions to share with the group as a whole, send your submission to clpens@trigger.net, and we will post them online, with as little editing as possible