Court Challenge to Bill C-78

[Mike]

FSNA members have been kept informed of developments on the pension surplus trial through our Web site. The latest development is that, just before Christmas, the judge presiding the trial made a decision favourable to the plaintiffs in deciding that the documents that had been tabled by the plaintiffs are admissible as evidence. This is very significant as many of these documents were written by senior government officials and many support the contention that the surplus belonged to the stakeholders: the employer, the employees and pensioners.

It is not known when the trial will resume. FSNA has contributed $90,000 up to now as its share of the costs of this court action. The 18 plaintiffs to this trial claim that the $30.2 billion surplus should be returned to the three pension plan accounts. The mater of surplus allocation between the government, the pensioners, and the employees might be raised during the trial, but only as a matter of surplus ownership as opposed to surplus utilisation.