Ontario Small Claims Court judge dismisses ex-crown employee's $200,000 pension claim over property assessment reorganization
June 20, 2024
An Ontario Small Claims Court judge has dismissed a claim by a former Ontario government employee who blamed the province’s reorganization of its property assessment regime for a $200,000 shortfall in his split pension.
Josef Kreppner had already spent 18 years as a member of the Ontario Public Service Pension Plan (PSPP) when the Ministry of Finance divested part of its functions to a body now known as the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) in 1998. Kreppner and other workers were given just a week to decide whether to accept the move, which also came with a pension transfer to the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) Pension Plan.
In 2018 — several years after his retirement — Kreppner sued the Ontario government, OMERS, the Ontario Pension Board (OPB, administrator of the PSPP) and MPAC after OMERS informed him of a 7.25-year shortfall in his total credited service that would cost him more than $200,000 to buy back.
Kreppner’s claim was for a token amount of around $13,000, representing a single symbolic year of losses. However, the Small Claims deputy judge found that the Ontario government had fulfilled its promise to provide transferred employees with a “comparable” pension.
He concluded that there was no promise to deal with any pension shortfalls resulting from the 1998 divestment. In addition, neither MPAC, OPB nor OMERS ever committed to pay for credited service shortfalls, the deputy judge ruled.
In any case, the deputy judge wrote that if he was wrong on the merits, Kreppner — a long-time split pension advocate — had missed the two-year limitations deadline, noting that he must have known of the potential for a lawsuit during his testimony before Queen’s Park in 2015, more than three years before he launched his lawsuit.
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