I sit down with Kevin Skerrett, a pension researcher who spent thirty years as a Senior Research Officer for CUPE and co-edited The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism. We trace how Canadian pension funds went from holding government bonds to becoming some of the world's most aggressive private-market investors.
We start with the nineteenth-century labour movement's demand for a universal, state-provided pension, and follow the mid-century turn toward employer-specific, financialized plans in the US, before tracing the same shift through the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and the Canada Pension Plan.
Kevin walks me through his own disillusionment negotiating joint union trusteeship in the 1990s, OMERS' role in privatizing Nova Scotia schools, and CPP Investment Board's involvement in privatizing Rio de Janeiro's water system under Bolsonaro. We close on what a $30 billion OTPP surplus could fund if fiduciary law required something other than maximum return.
Up now on Patreon: my interview with Chiara Padovani, running for Toronto City Councillor in Ward 5.
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