So now it's official. In a recent Globe and Mail article, Toronto Dominion chief economist Don Drummond is quoted as saying that Canadians should be forced to save more for retirement because their RRSPs and private-sector pension plans are in tatters. Many Canadians don't know how little their retirement investments will yield, so the Harper government should consider a new mandatory savings plan that goes beyond the modest payouts of the Canada Pension Plan.

Also according to that newspaper, financial advice goes straight from Mr. Drummond's lips to Finance Minister Flaherty's ear so we shouldn't have to wait too long for the new universal pension plan that CARP has been advocating.

Mr. Drummond is right, of course. Many people who are not yet retired are blissfully unaware of how little the CPP provides -- a $10,905 maximum in 2009 -- or how much savings they need in order to retire.

So it's not surprising that 3.9 million Canadian families (29 per cent of the population) have no retirement savings whatsoever. Single people are much worse off: 45 per cent do not have any retirement savings. Of the 65-plus, including singles, 27.5 per cent have no savings to get them through their "golden" years. This survey was last done in 2005.

Just revealing that way too many Canadians have not adequately provided for their own retirement is unlikely to garner much public sympathy or political action until, that is, an election looms. The British Columbia government introduced Bill 11 to pave the way for a defined contribution multi-employer pension plan. That was on March 23, 2009, and the Bill received Royal Assent by March 31, 2009, just before the run-up to their May 12 election.

When people do the math, their shock and awe is palpable. Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan admitted that he just "doesn't look" at his pension situation. And he is already better off than most of his constituents. The Cabinet Minister's ultimate employer -- the Ontario taxpayer -- contributes 10 per cent of the minister's salary to his pension plan, and the minister contributes five per cent more. All jurisdictions have something similar -- taxpayer-as-employer contributions being the most important similarity. People in the private sector without such a generous employer have much less put aside for their own retirement.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, we provide a retirement security for our political masters that is magnitudes richer than what we can afford for ourselves.

And there's more. A RRSP, as everyone knows who has (or prior to the crash, had) one, is subject to the ravages of the market. The civil service has a defined benefit plan which means that they can depend on what they will be getting once they retire and deficiencies due to market downturns are guaranteed by -- you guessed it -- taxpayers. Technically, the government is the employer and in Ontario, just allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to top up its civil service pension funds.

Against this backdrop, it becomes obvious why there must be pension reform. Not only is the current pension system grossly inadequate to ensure a decent retirement for most Canadians but the current state of affairs is also manifestly unfair.

The devil is in the details. It's fine for bank executives sitting on their seven-figure incomes to tell the rest of us that we should be saving more for our retirement. But before you ask: "With what money?" consider what this means.

It means that instead of the 4.95 per cent on the first $46,300 of our salaries we contribute to CPP (bearing in mind that many earn less than $46,300), we will have to contribute nearly nine to 10 per cent on the first $116,000 of salary and the employer must match that contribution in order for us to retire on what experts say we need, namely about 70 per cent of our pre-retirement income.

Provided we have a pension plan to contribute to -- most of us don't. That's why CARP is calling on government to establish a universal pension plan, modeled on the CPP architecture, either national or provincial in scope, to provide a retirement savings vehicle that will be accessible, affordable and robust enough to withstand demographic and economic challenges like those of recent years -- and provided there is the political will to tell Canadians how much we must save.

Then we can all have an even chance of spending our retirement counting our money instead of counting the days.