Scott Brison, member of Parliament (MP) for the Kings — Hants riding in Nova Scotia and a former contender for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, brings a lifelong familiarity with investing to the political realm.
Brison has been an entrepreneur, an investment banker with a major Toronto-based securities firm and is currently chairman of Halifax-based SeaFort Capital Inc., a Canadian private equity investment firm backed by the powerful McCain and Sobey families of Atlantic Canada. He is also on the board of Norvista Resoures Corp. a Toronto-based merchant bank focusing on junior mining companies, and his husband, Maxime Saint-Pierre, is a financial advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. in Halifax.
In addition, Brison serves as the Liberals’ spokesperson on economic issues and the party’s finance critic. He also serves as vice chairman of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance and is co-chairman of Justin Trudeau’s Economic Council of Advisors.
As a young boy growing up in the rural area of Windsor, N.S., Brison’s antennae were tuning into the investment world. His father was a local grocery owner who became a stockbroker in his 40s and remained active in the business until he was 82 years old (he’s now 92). Brison was fascinated by his father’s connection to the stock market and would accompany his father when he visited clients. He began buying his own stocks as a teenager.
“We lived in the country, and would be piling wood or building a fence, and I’d be asking Dad what was going on at Brascan. It used to drive him crazy,” Brison says.
Brison obtained a bachelor of commerce in 1989 from Dalhousie University, at which he exercised his entrepreneurial talents renting small refrigerators. After graduating and spending some time in corporate sales, he moved into investment banking in July 2000, when he became vice president at Yorkton Securities Inc., at which he divided his time between Halifax and Toronto.
In the 1997 federal election, Brison entered politics as a candidate with the former Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He was elected to the House of Commons that year and again in 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2011. Due to reservations about his party linking up with the socially conservative Canadian Alliance, he switched allegiance in 2003 to sit as a Liberal MP. In 2004, he was named to former prime minister Paul Martin’s cabinet as minister of public works and government services.
Brison is in favour of bringing the contribution limit for the tax-free savings account (TFSA) back down to $5,500 and increasing the scope of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) to include bigger contributions and bigger payouts.
“The old days where you graduated from school and went to work for a company for 20 or 30 years, then retired with a defined-benefit pension plan, are over,” he says. “Today, the reality is that more and more middle-class Canadians will depend on CPP as primary retirement vehicle.”
Many families are being squeezed as they find themselves subsidizing adult children who are having trouble becoming financially independent, he says, noting that many baby boomer parents are postponing retirement and forgoing retirement savings.
“The CPP, at its current size, won’t be sufficient to meet the retirement needs of a broad group of middle-class families,” he says. “There is a need to expand the CPP, and it’s far better to have a co-ordinated national approach than to have different provinces moving ahead individually with their own plans.”
Not only do people find it difficult to save for retirement, few have the investment knowledge to manage their own assets as well as the professional managers who oversee the CPP, he says.
“I know enough about investing to know I’m not Warren Buffett, nor is the average person,” Brison says. “At the end of the day, a part-time investor is not going to do as well as a professional like Buffett or Mark Wiseman [president and CEO of the CPP Investment Board].”
Brison doesn’t see the average middle-class family being helped by the new TFSA limit of $10,000 implemented in this past spring’s federal budget and says the previous limit of $5,500 is adequate.
“The people who can afford to double their [annual] TFSA investment are often the same people who are maxing out their RRSPs, and they’re already well off,” he says. “The rest are more dependent on public pensions, and we must be cognizant of protecting the fiscal capacity of the government down the road.”
Specifically, research has shown that larger TFSA limits would result in severe losses to government tax revenue as the amount in TFSAs grows and compounds, Brison says. Although contributions to TFSAs are not tax deductible for Canadians, all future growth and subsequent withdrawals are tax-free.
“As a government we would be looking at the growing cost of health care for the aging population, the silver tsunami that’s in our future,” he says. “There’s a body of evidence that says doubling the size of the TFSA would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in government revenue — the hit would be monstrous down the road.”
Brison supports the recent changes to registered retireme income funds that lower the mandatory withdrawal requirements, and says he would also support raising the age limit for commencing withdrawals. On the other hand, he would like to see the age for qualifying for old-age security brought back to 65 from the new level of 67 the current Conservative government is phasing in.
“Some people are able to work into their 70s and 80s in good health, but if you’re a labourer doing hard, physical work, your body is worn out by 65,” he says. “Raising the age limit is taking money out of the pockets of the most vulnerable.”