Toronto, December 4, 2019  – The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) has provided consent to the transfer of assets from Torstar Corporation’s eight defined benefit (DB) pensions plans into the CAAT Pension Plan. The assets – totalling almost $900 million – were transferred to CAAT on December 2, 2019.

The transfer is the last stage of the merger process, which began after the Torstar DB Plan members provided overwhelming support in favour of joining the CAAT Plan.

Active Torstar DB plan members were the first to join CAAT’s new DBplus plan design that provides defined benefits at a fixed cost. DBplus features include a guaranteed lifetime pension with conditional inflation protection, survivor pension benefits, and early retirement options. Now that assets have been transferred to CAAT, more than 3,500 Torstar members will have their retirement pensions payable from the CAAT Pension Plan.

The CAAT Pension Plan is open for growth in membership where it is mutually beneficial, from the public, private or not-for-profit sectors in Canada. This includes workplaces currently offering defined benefit pension plans, defined contribution plans, group RRSPs, and those with no current workplace retirement savings plan. The Torstar merger was the first time a private sector single employer pension plan (SEPP) merged with a jointly sponsored pension plan (JSPP). The merger confirms that the CAAT Plan is an innovative, modern pension plan that is capable of offering to other single-employer pension plans the same measure of security that our members have enjoyed for over 50 years.