Reminds me of a story out of Winnipeg years ago.......

....when retired CPR workers had a fixed pension of $150/month, with no COLA clauses built in. This was in the 50's, when that sum was enough to live on. But these same retired workers also lived in "company housing", and were threatened with eviction when the rent they paid exceeded their pension earnings.

Re: Tired

There’s a myriad of reasons why people aren’t saving for retirement. For many of the young, retirement is a long way off - to be dealt with later. There’s layoffs; inadequate incomes; other responsibilities and interests - houses, rent, kids, vehicles, etc.; lack of investment vehicles that provide enough incentive to want to save; disappointment in previous investments; lack of respect for the financial system in general; inflationary pressures; social pressure to show one is an achiever combined easy credit and the immediate reward of consumer spending; etc.; etc.

We know where our “extra” dollars are currently going - the increase in the cost of basic necessities where we live has increased astronomically compared to incomes. For those who live in larger urban areas, it’s probably the cost of housing that sucks pocketbooks dry.

Neither of us have pension plans, so we’ve tried really hard to get finances organized for retirement, with disappointing results. Saving for retirement has been a priority for quite a while, but when things like “the crash” take even relatively “safe” investments to an amount below what was put into them years ago, it hurts. The really “safe” investments aren’t even remotely keeping up with inflation.

Our house is paid for. We don’t purchase something unless we can pay for it, and we pay off our credit cards immediately. We have a garden, and we gather from the land. But, we still don’t feel prepared for what may come our way financially when we retire. Believe me, there are times we think that all this amateur “retirement planning” we are trying to make with our hard earned money could end up biting us in the butt. We could end up falling into the category where we won’t have quite enough to survive retirement well, but fall into the category where we don’t qualify for government subsidy. Wouldn’t that be a kicker for all these years of trying to be financially responsible?

Self-sufficiency and Pensions...

As I've said elsewhere in one of these pension threads, if you are going to save for a pension yourself, first you have to have an income share that will allow for saving for it. This being especially when you are in those vulnerable young and raising children years, when your earnings, as a lower end working class person especially, are at their lowest and your needs the highest.

Even then, if you are going to go to "private plans", which have a tendency to disappear as soon as the employer or the financial carrier gets in difficulty in major economic downturns, you will always be exposed to "market volatility", so get used to it. Capitalism and its stock market/financial system is really little more than a big gambling casino, subject to the manipulations of the Big Boys with deep, deep pockets who want to plunder all the Lunch-buckets at their mercy.

Self-sufficiency, which I take to mean non-reliance on a lasting beneficence of the ruling class financial/market or State system, the value of which is now being proved again for the umpteenth time, means to me, at least in part, the creation of a pension system based on an economic arrangement of things which working class folks control themselves as well. And whatever form that takes, it should certainly not be surrendered up to be determined by the interests and manipulations of the ruling class financial controlled system. All that needs to be changed first. The horse has to come before the cart.

Until then, working class share in wages or pensions, and the status quo saving systems in place themselves, from banks to the sundry ponzi "private" schemes, will always be vulnerable to the cyclical collapses of the capitalist market and financial system. If that suits you, and you are still preferring to put up with that, continue to content yourself with sucking the hind tit, and the cyclical devastation of market collapses and corruption as well. The two go together like the class system and corruption.

Cash in your mattress...

My wife had an uncle who hid a large portion of his savings under a big vise in his shop. He survived the collapse of the capitalist financial system better than many who mocked him, and put their savings in mutual funds. He remembered well the lesson his generation learned in the 1930s. "Never trust the goddamn banks.", or by extension, the financial system of capitalism.

Long term goal.

Retirement is a long term goal. It requires manditory contributions by individuals into secure investments. Now we see signs that the gvt is loosening the strings on the CPP and although making noise about tightening restrictions on private plans, the net result will likely be a loosening of restrictions. It does not make sense to me that the gvt would loosen restrictions and investment guidelines for CPP and tighten restrictions on private plans.
Investing CPP funds in Co's like Wallmart is wrong because it's well known that Co's like Wallmart actually hurt the local economy by removing money out of the local economy. These companies also hurt local economy's by putting small companies who's money stays in the local economy, out of business.

It's pretty simple,

It's pretty simple, really.
Reguire everyone to contribute to public schemes with low overheads (allowing folks to escape the consequences of their own myopia and the clutches of the financial parasites).
Handle redistribution though the tax/expenditure system.
Decide whether we want Government to handle he "insurance" involved in making the public scheme defined benefit, or just pay what scheme can afford.

I appreciate Ed Deak's yearning for an age when we could all subsist in small communities and direct inter-actions with nature. That's a pipedream, however, for a human population of more than, say, one billion.

The Ignatieff position provides further proof of his basic superficiality, and yen to pander to the powers that be.
my two bits