An Overview of Canada's Public Pensions System and Private Retirement Savings
Ottawa (4 May 2007) –The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) has released the third and fourth in a series of Pensions Backgrounders it is producing. The publications are designed for union activists seeking educational material to build their knowledge base and skill level around critical issues in the field of pensions.
The two new backgrounders are An Overview of Canada’s Public Pension System and Private Retirement Savings.
An Overview of Canada’s Public Pension System details the three publicly administered programs that make up Canada’s public pension system: Old Age Security (OAS), the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). It provides an overview of the history, benefits, eligibility criteria and current rates for each of the three programs.
Private Retirement Savings provides an overview of Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs), the most popular method of personal savings for retirement among Canadians. RRSPs now receive more money each year than registered pension plans (RPPs). In 2005, over 6.1 million Canadians contributed $30.6 billion to RRSPs. In comparison, 4.6 million Canadians belonged to about 1,400 registered pension plans in 2005 and the total contributions (from both employers and workers) to those plans were $30.3 billion.
The first two of the backgrounder series – Pensions Are Important and A Brief History of Pensions in Canada were released in March of this year.
A section of the National Union website entitled NUPGE and Pensions contains many of the NUPGE pension publications as well as news stories on pension issues from across Canada and around the world. The National Union also produces a regular Pensions E-Bulletin containing the top pensions news stories from its website. For those who are interested in subscribing to our Pensions E-Bulletin please e-mail national@nupge.ca.
NUPGE is one of Canada's largest labour organizations in Canada with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE
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