Alberta is not entitled to half of CPP fund, says chief actuary

financialpost.com:

Canada’s chief actuary has determined that Alberta is not entitled to take more than half the funds in the Canada Pension Plan if its provincial government decides to follow through on a proposal to leave the national retirement scheme.

Chief actuary Assia Billig, in her assessment released on Friday, said she independently assessed the legislation behind the CPP and concluded the province would not be entitled to walk away with $334 billion of the fund’s projected assets by 2027, as contemplated in a report by Lifeworks commissioned by Alberta’s government.

Lifeworks, a unit of Telus Health (Canada) Ltd., produced the number based on its assessment of what the contributions of Albertans since the 1960s would be worth.

The chief actuary did not say exactly how much of the CPP fund Albertans would be entitled to, which would be used to create a separate, standalone Alberta Pension Plan, but she concluded it would be more in line with the amount calculated by University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe.

He said Albertans should get between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of the CPP fund in a 2023 analysis, which was based on publicly available information about contributions and his assessment of language in the legislation that governs the CPP.

“The Government of Alberta’s preferred estimate that 53 per cent of the CPP would go to Alberta is clearly rejected,” Tombe said on Friday, adding that he and the chief actuary used different logic, but arrived at the same conclusion.

That actuary’s conclusion, he said, “is entirely consistent with the original meaning of the CPP Act, a plain reading of the language of the act, and the historical operation of the plan for the first several decades of the CPP when we actually