Experience

Goldblatt Partners LLP

• Canada
• Legal Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Partner

  • Jun 1998 - Present

  The Trustees of several multi-employer pension plans rely on me to help them navigate the highly-regulated world of running a target-benefit pension plan while meeting the high standards the law requires of them. My clients include both jointly-trusteed and union-trusteed plans, including some with members from more than one union. I also represents trustees of health and welfare plans and multi-employer, defined contribution plans. I enjoy advising Trustees on how to reconcile and apply often-conflicting provincial and federal pension laws to ensure that all members are treated equitably and unnecessary court and regulatory proceedings are avoided. While acting for my clients I have:- convinced New Brunswick to permit his client to apply the pension legislation of British Columbia to that plan’s New Brunswick members so they could avoid the benefit reductions otherwise required;- made multiple presentations to Quebec’s pension regulator which ultimately lead to the complete rewriting of that province’s pension legislation for multi-employer pension plans;- successfully divided three multi-jurisdictional, multi-employer pension plans, with members in eight different provinces, in accordance with the then-draft Agreement Respecting Multi-Jurisdictional Pension Plans; and- assisted an Ontario-registered, multi-employer plan in growing from less than 25,000 members to more than 60,000 members while increasing its assets from $300 million to more than $1.6 billion.I also represents unions and individual plan members in pension plan disputes to ensure that they receive everything they are legally-entitled to receive, and sometimes more. I am a former journalist, and offshore oilfield worker, who was called to the Ontario bar in 2000 after articling at the firm. I am a member of the Financial Services Commission of Ontario’s Multi-Employer Pension Plan Advisory Committee and an enthusiastic, but highly unskilled golfer.