Tag Archives: pensions

Bev Oda’s now you see it, now you don’t expenses

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Gotta love Bev Oda, Canada’s Minister of Expensive London Hotels, Limousine Rides and $16 Glasses of Orange Juice.

About that pricey orange juice. Here on top of the 93rd floor of the Class Rage Tower we have a little computer programme that allows us to crunch complex mathematical equations.

Here’s what we did.   We took the average monthly Old Age Security Pension payout for 2012 ($510.21 Canadian) and divided it by the number of days in a month.  Okay not all months have 30 days, but for argument’s sake we used the number 30.

So $510.21 divided by 30 = $17.01 rounded off to the nearest cent.   (It won’t matter soon, because Harper is getting rid of the one cent coin).

If Bev Oda hadn’t bought that $16 glass of orange juice in London, England it could have paid a senior their OAS for almost an entire day.    If she’d stayed in the cheaper hotel she wouldn’t have needed the limo. Who knows how many days of OAS payouts that would have saved!

Anyway, Oda eventually paid the money back…after she got caught.

Today we learned about Minister Oda’s “now you see them, now you don’t” expense claims via Charlie Angus and Scott Andrews, the ethics critics for the NDP and Liberals.

It seems that the expense claim amounts for Minister Oda’s trips to East Africa, South Korea and Haiti that were reported on government websites mysteriously changed.

Inquiring minds would like to know why.

 

A government lowering the retirement age?

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France’s new Socialist Party government has made a move to partially lower the retirement age from 62 to 60.

With the new rules, those who started working before age 19 will be able to collect a full pension at age 60.   The previous right-wing government raised the retirement age from 60 to 62 in 2010.

While it’s not as good as before, at least it’s a partial victory for older workers.

Meanwhile here in Canada, Harper plans to defacto raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 by delaying people’s eligibility to collect the Old Age Security (OAS) pension and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS).

If you were born after February 1, 1962 it’s two more years at your shitty job.   If you were born between April 1, 1958 and January 31, 1962 you’ll be working anywhere from an extra month to an extra twenty three months before you’ll get your OAS pension.

The lesson to be learned from France?   Don’t take crap from your government.