Bill 20 – Civil Enforcement Amendment Act, 2009
Ms Blakeman: Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. I hadn’t, I’ll admit quietly, been paying an incredible amount of attention to this bill, but I’m paying a lot more attention to things that have to do with RRSPs these days, so that kind of caught my attention. I started to go through the bill, and indeed I have learned a few things recently.
Therefore, I and my colleagues have been supportive of this bill as it’s moved through the various stages and will continue to be supportive of it in third reading. It does help us harmonize with the rest of Canada. I think this is one of the suggestions that has flowed from the Uniform Law Commission. They’ve recommended a redefinition of the scope of garnishment and moving away from the sort of old definitions and concepts of debts and accruing due and substitutions. I mean, you get into a lot of legal-beagle language here, but essentially it’s recommending that a debtor’s property, subject to specific and principled exceptions, be left alone.
What we need here, what I need here desperately – this provides creditor protection of retirement savings to noninsurable registered retirement savings plans. My understanding is that the federal legislation, the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, excludes certain classes and types of property that could be claimed by a trustee through a litigation process. So under the auspices of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act those properties that are exempt under provincial statutes are taken by the federal statute.
Prior to this the only forms of retirement savings plan that were generally exempted from execution by creditors under Alberta law were pension plans or insurable RRSPs. The life-insured forms of RRSP insurance products that were previously exempt in that they’re essentially life insurance contracts have been addressed through the Insurance Act.
We’ve got a Uniform Law Commission that’s recommending this. When we look across the country, we’re looking at Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland that have similar legislation. I think that as we as legislators look at the ability of government to provide for people in retirement years, we can clearly see a need for individuals to be having more of their own savings to be able to use for retirement. Fair is fair here. We need to try and enable that and encourage it as much as possible. So when you see legislation like this, you understand that it is signalling to people: please, you know, save your own money in RRSPs, and we’ll do our best to make sure that that isn’t swept away from you except under truly exceptional circumstances. That’s what I’m seeing in this legislation, so I’m happy to support it today.
There are a number of other sort of administrative parts to this, but essentially it’s creditor protection for the noninsurable kinds of registered retirement savings plans. So it sounds good to me.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.
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