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March 5, 2007 Surplus has come from workersRe: Federal lawyers deny $30-billion pension surplus ever existed, Feb. 28 Every federal public service worker, RCMP officer and Canadian Forces member has had deductions off their pay with the assurance of a secure and sufficient income upon retirement. This means less available money from each paycheque to pay for the mortgage, the car loan or the kids' tuition fees. But like every other worker, they can live with a little belt-tightening now for the promise of a secure future. What reaction then does the government expect from these workers when lawyers declare there are no actual funds in the account into which they have been paying money? "No money flows anywhere... It's just numbers on a ledger sheet," lawyer Alan Lenczner told Ontario Superior Court in arguing that pension-plan members have no claim to the surplus because it never existed in the first place. Today these workers have been paying and will be paying still more into this imaginary account to cover what the government imagines to be a deficit. Unfortunately, these workers do not have the convenience of using the same argument to tell banks and lending institutions to just credit their current debts with imaginary cash. Regardless of what accounting mumbo-jumbo government lawyers use to defend their theft of the pension surplus, to pension-plan members it is plain and simple: That surplus, or at least a good portion of it, came from their paycheques. John Gordon, Ottawa |