Hugh Mackenzie

It is time for governments to call a halt to the self-interested lobbying of the financial services industry and move on to the task of repairing our badly broken retirement income system.

The Liberals' commitment to tax fairness in this year's federal budget appears to have collapsed like a pile of Jenga blocks in the face of the oldest trick in the playbook of the rich and privileged.

As Canadians are exhorted to pour money into their RRSP investments before the February tax deadline, let's take the opportunity to reflect on the overwhelming advantages of our public pension system.

The big news out of the latest announcement from the Ontario government about the Ontario Registered Pension Plan is that there is no news.

The average compensation of the top 100 CEOs in Canada would have reached the average Canadian's annual full-time earnings by 18 minutes past noon on January 4, the second paid day of the year.

We need to take this episode as a wake-up call -- as a springboard for fundamentally rethinking the way corporations operate, re-balancing private versus public interests in our regulatory system.

What a surprise! The NDP makes a proposal for a very modest increase in corporate tax rates and defenders of all things corporate in Canada turn on their scary corporate tax number-generating machine.

Two cheers for the Ontario government's steps toward a better retirement income system in Canada, and a big, heartfelt raspberry for the details of how they plan to do it.

Ontario must wake up and modernize its property assessment legislation to protect this critical source of revenue for local government.

The best measure of the political saliency of expanding public pensions might be the progression of conservative think-tank studies purporting to show that there is no need for an expanded CPP.