A Darkness At The End Of The Tunnel

You spend your entire adult lifetime working for a firm that you believed in and the products and image you helped to produce often beat out the competition and provided increased advantage to the lives of people. The benefits were good and the life insurance plan was up-to-date. And then it happened - a work accident or some physical or mental incapacity - and you had to fall back on your Long-Term Disability Plan (LTD) as you sought to fight your way back to productivity. Then rumblings and rumours started, claiming that your firm was going under, perhaps even declaring bankruptcy. Your old executive manager or union boss breaks the news to you that your LTD might be downsized. You sit down with your spouse, hold on to one another, because there is no place for you to turn except social assistance, and you swore you would never journey down that path.There are one million Canadians who belong to such LTD plans, and in this volatile economic climate they stare at the future with uncertainty. They are a bankruptcy away from destitution. This is especially true of the 400 Nortel workers on LTD who only have two months left to prepare for an ominous future. They paid into a plan their entire working career and now they can only access it for a few more weeks.When a company like Nortel, with self-funded long-term disability benefits goes bankrupt, its employees who depend on these benefits are given the same standing, the same priority, as that of an unsecured creditor. In other words, secure creditors get the first kick at the can to get their money back; unsecured creditors have to fend for themselves. Chances of keeping the LTD at normal levels are slim because the company isn't likely to honour its commitment.  "How can that be?" so many Nortel folks are asking at present. "It was our money; we paid into it so it would be there if we required it." This makes perfect sense, and the fact that the funds can't be acquired because you wait in a line behind secured creditors seems clearly unjust.Somehow, we have permitted ourselves to accept such conditions in our modern Canadian society. We know such situations are wrong but remain unsure as to how to deal with it. Well, here's an opportunity. Bill S-216 is a piece of legislation coming out of the Senate that offers to place those like the Nortel folks on LTDs in a special "preferred" status, effectively placing them ahead of unsecure creditors but behind the secured ones. It's a least a step in the right direction. It's not as far as some of us would like to take the issue, but it is moving forward. Presently, LTD recipients have no protection when bankruptcy occurs. With Nortel, there are only 35% of the assets necessary to fund its obligations to all employees. As it stands now, LTD employees will only receive 20% of their normal LTD compensation. For people like Josee Marin, a former lab technologist at Nortel, and a single mother suffering from Crohn's disease, her LTD payment will go from $2,143 per month to $433. Social assistance for Josee will be just around the corner. Her other benefits will run out at the end of the year and she is facing a bleak future.Write your MP and urge them to support the measure presently in the House of Commons. Currently, 34 of 54 countries in the OECD and World Bank already have either super-priority or preferred status for people like Josee.  It's time Canada caught up. Difficult days lie ahead, but if a worker can't expect an equitable payout from their own funds they have invested, then we out to stop bragging about being a "just society."  Help the Nortel folks by speaking up.