Christensen, Benjamin B.

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is a lobby group for Canada's top 150 CEOs. This organization consolidates the various demands of corporate capital into a unified voice to influence Canadian public policy. This thesis will periodize the CCCE's policy recommendations from 1988 to 2008 to historically examine the evolving trajectory of discourses produced by the CCCE. To theorize processes of state reorientation and economic restructuring occurring in Canada, and the CCCE's role within these transformations, this thesis draws on Jessop's (2002) concept of the "Schumpeterian Competition State". I also employ Gramsci's (1971) theory of hegemony to frame how the CCCE persistently attempts to replace existing forms of "common sense" with their own particular form of economic rationality. I conclude that the CCCE provides strategic-discursive frameworks that positively interpret processes of economic restructuring, helping reorient Canadian public policy, thus illustrating the CCCE as a conduit of hegemonic discourses.

The article reports on the new mandate released by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), a non-partisan lobby group whose membership consists of top 150 chief executive officer (CEO) in Canada in 2009. It notes that this was released due to the economic downturn and to make the country the best place in the world to live, to work, to invest and to grow. It also mentions that the mandate depicted the CCCE as social activists working on behalf of all Canadians.

Since the late 1960s, the New Canadian Political Economy (NCPE) has played an important role in shaping the trajectory of the social sciences in Canada and informing the political goals and strategies of a range of progressive social movements. However, few studies have attempted to trace the history of the NCPE as a distinctive intellectual tradition or account for its place in consolidating a Left political milieu in Canada outside of Quebec. Exploring the NCPE as part of a wider Left formation, this article examines the role played by organic intellectuals in building this tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues regarding the problems pension plans due to poor management and limitations of Canada's voluntary private pension system. It mentions security of defined benefit (DB) plans and acceptance of defined contribution (DC) plans for future hires and part-time workers, the self-employed and independent contractors usually have no pension coverage. It also mentions challenges of providing retirement income security for Canada's labour force.

This dissertation traces the rise and decline of Ontario’s workplace pension system that has resulted with growing emphasis on Canada’s public pension system, focusing on the postwar period to 2016. Since the mid-1980s, workplace pension coverage in Ontario and across Canada has been decreasing, calling into question the ability of this system to provide adequate retirement income for future workers. Currently, large private and public sector employers such as Air Canada, General Motors Canada and Canada Post are seeking to replace secure defined benefit plans with less secure defined contribution plans. Given these trends, policymakers at the provincial and federal levels have attempted to remedy the insecurity produced by diminishing coverage rates. Using Ontario as a case study to examine Canada’s retirement income system, this dissertation asks: Why has the risk of saving for retirement shifted, and what factors have driven this? Drawing from 22 semi-structure interviews with pension professionals, descriptive statistics, and Hansard Parliamentary transcriptions, several findings are established. First, although risk has been increasingly individualized since the 1990s, there is a limit to how much risk workers are willing to accept before political coalitions form to demand government play a larger role in establishing retirement income security. Risk transfer is thus contingent on union power, retiree activism, business lobbying, and the ideological position of governing parties. Second, the rise of individualized risk is generating new provincial/federal political dynamics in the field of pension policy, in which the failure of Canada’s workplace pension systems is impacting the welfare state politics of Canada, pointing to the emergence of a new period of pension politics. This finding leads to the conclusion that in the field of pension policy in Canada, the assertion by risk theorists that globalizing forces are transforming the welfare/citizenship nexus away from a model premised on risk sharing to one in which the state must facilitate the needs of rational, risk taking citizens does not adequately describe recent trends in Canadian pension policymaking.