Sears Canada pensioners saw it coming.

In 2013 they predicted that Sears Canada would go out of business, stranding them with an enormous deficit in the pension plan they had been contributing to for most of their working lives.

A deficit would mean reduced pension payouts in retirement – reductions many of them could ill afford.

They saw it coming and they tried to fix it.

They wrote to Sears Canada CEO Calvin McDonald in 2013, they met with Sears Canada chairman Brandon Stranzl in 2016. They communicated repeatedly with the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO). They wrote to Premier Kathleen Wynne and to every Ontario MPP. They met with representatives from Ontario’s finance ministry.

In all, the list of actions taken by members of the Sears Store and Catalogue Retiree Group (SCRG) runs across three pages of an affidavit filed in court that lists 41 steps taken to address the shortfall, as well as some of the responses – and those are just the steps taken since 2012.

They had begun expressing concern as far back as 2009.

And yet, when Sears Canada applied for protection from creditors on June 22 last year, the deficit in the defined benefit pension plan was $266.8 million. Sears Canada pensioners – 16,000 of them – now face the prospect of reduced pension incomes……more here