Quote:
Originally Posted by micheal
I care because it comes out of mine and your pocket. The taxpayer. I care because the taxpayer carry's 100% of the pension liability and debt. It's not the governments responsibility to create jobs but to foster a good economic environment through sound policy. We don't live in the 1920's. There was a time and a place but those days are gone. It's the private sector that creates wealth and tax revenue for governments. The public sector has proven time and time again that it is inefficient and heavily laded bureaucracy . Thus affecting our, the citizens and taxpayers of this province, ability to receive a higher ROI.
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Pensions have been DC in Saskatchewan for years (definitely in the main crowns at least), so there aren't a huge amount of people left that are either long term employees that didn't convert from the DB plan and are still working or have retired and are now drawing benefits. There is basically no possibility of having some massive unfunded pension liability like the city of Regina or other jurisdictions are concerned about. All employees hired for the last ~40 years have had a pension plan where they put in x% of their salary, the crown corp puts in y%, and whatever the final total is, that's what the employee can use to purchase an annuity or do whatever they want to get their retirement income stream.
The era of DB plans in Saskatchewan crowns is over and the DC pension plan for Sask public employees is actually the largest DC pool of funds in Canada, mostly because every larger pooled fund in Canada is a DB or hybrid plan. Also, because of its size, the Saskatchewan DC plan (Public Employees Pension Plan) is actually one of the leaders in the Canadian industry in terms of innovation in the DC space and they are able to use economies of scale to have very low fees, but allow a very broad array of investment options. It's actually a pretty interesting example of where a "public corporation" can be more efficient due to scale, especially when it is legislated to be an arms length organization.
There is a major caveat though.. it can take decades to unwind a DB plan, so the idea of converting can have a lot of unexpected costs along the way. Plus, if Sasktel did had a massive unfunded pension obligation, you could bet that value and more would be immediately deducted from any offer Robellus would put. We can of course debate the ideology of whether a public or private corporation is more efficient. But let's keep the misinformation out of it.
For the record though, I think it is definitely a case by case basis on whether the public or private is more efficient, and it usually comes down to how much governments interfere with public corporations to suit their aims. Two of the biggest risks are if a government forces artificially low prices to appease the population, or pulls out too much capital so that the corporation is unable to reinvest in further innovation or improvements. The Sask Party, its predecessors, and the NDP have all been guilty of various forms of these manipulations.
As far as Sasktel goes... the government has been interfering a bit more lately by taking such huge dividends vs the actual profits as posted by Stealthgirl, but overall, Sasktel provide's services that are on par and in some ways better (coverage area especially) than similar private sector companies and at a fraction of the cost, while still turning a modest profit... This tells me that even as "bloated" as Sasktel may be, they are making the most of their efficiencies and scale within the Saskatchewan market.