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Alberta-commissioned report on CPP withdrawal used flawed methodologies

Published: 29 January 2025

When Alberta commissioned a report on withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan, the resulting document claimed the province was entitled to $334 billion more than half of the plan’s total assets. However, the method used to calculate that share is deeply flawed. If applied to other provinces, the combined total of their share would exceed the plan’s actual assets.
“If you work on the basis that every province was going to leave the plan and you needed to distribute a share of the pie to each of them, the sum of the parts should be equal to the pie itself — not more, not less,” says Associate Professor Sebastien Betermier in an interview with Benefits Canada. “That isn’t the case in the report Alberta commissioned. If you were to use the same method, you would get numbers that exceed 100 per cent when you add up all provinces’ shares.”

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