Let’s hear it for pensions! who can argue that small, periodic contributions, prudently invested in large pools at low cost by the best money managers and over many years, is not a good thing?

Well, quite a few of us, it seems. Or perhaps it’s more a matter of how pensions are funded – and by whom – that has created such a kerfuffle when it comes to the advent of Ontario’s new public pension plan, championed by Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. The premier has said repeatedly that her government is moving forward aggressively with the plan because of the federal Tories’ refusal to beef up the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), currently capped at $12,500 per year. The aim is to help the two-thirds of Ontarians who have no workplace pension of any kind.

The Harper government has responded, also repeatedly, that Canadians still can’t afford to juice up the CPP and should focus instead on eliminating the deficit.

Under the Ontario scheme, employers that do not have a pension plan must deduct 1.9% of the first $90,000 of an employee’s annual salary. Employers must match that amount.

Neither the investing industry nor small businesses are happy with the proposals. The former cites the lack of individual choice when it comes to saving – certainly a reality. And businesses say their overhead will rise, with no apparent boost to the bottom line, although it could be argued that happier employees contribute to productivity.

But there’s another factor in favour of this new plan that, in the long run, could also reduce the overall tax burden. It’s one that Wynne’s government has not mentioned, perhaps because the topic proved fatal to her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty: the intractable problem of bringing more balance to the ever- widening gap between public- and private-sector pensions. Dwight Duncan, McGuinty’s finance minister (backed by recommendations in the Drummond Report of 2012, which called for strong measures to restrain public spending), took a run at it. As Duncan noted when tabling the 2012 budget, which included measures to reduce government contributions to some public pensions: “We do not think it is fair to ask a single mother who earns $14 an hour and who has no pension plan to pay even more of her hard-earned tax dollars into the pension funds of [public servants].”

Yay to that. But confronting the issue puts politicians on thin ice. McGuinty’s tussle with public servants over pensions helped propel his departure little more than a year later. And similar showdowns in other provinces have proven that this imbalance will not be easily righted. But if many more Ontarians are covered by workplace pensions, it may be easier to take on the quiet, steady, years-long negotiations that the reform of public-servant pensions will require.

And those strapped single parents, rather than voting for parties that espouse wholesale hacking of the province’s valuable network of public services to achieve these ends overnight, can focus on their families without worrying about destitution when their jobs are done.

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