(Quebec) The Legault government is abandoning the idea of raising the minimum age of eligibility for the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) from 60 to 62 years old.
During an intervention in the House on Thursday, the Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, affirmed that this proposal “did not achieve consensus” during the consultations in the parliamentary committee.
“The Quebec Pension Plan belongs to all Quebecers” and “we do not intend to impose choices that people do not want. We will continue the analysis. We will make our decisions known to the budget,” he said.
However, when the minister specified the measures that the government was going to adopt at the end of the consultations, he identified two of them. The first is to make contributions to the QPP after age 65 optional, an election promise of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ). The second aims to modify the rules for calculating the retirement pension “in order to prevent the earnings from work of a person who applies for his pension after age 65 from reducing the average earnings used to calculate his pension” – a “excellent measure”, said the Minister. He did not mention the age of eligibility for the QPP.
During a press scrum, Eric Girard confirmed that the government was simply going to put forward the measures on which there was consensus. “We don’t have the leeway to do everything that has been proposed,” he pleaded.
With Fanny Lévesque, The Press