And we'll keep waiting, until government and opposition can find an issue to divide them. For now, both seem content to hurl charges back and forth that could as readily be applied to either side's pet scheme for reform of the CPP (as well as its sister, the Quebec Pension Plan -- by law, any changes to the CPP must be mirrored in the QPP).

The Reform Party, for example, has invested heavily in the accusation that the 73 per cent increase in CPP "contributions" that the plan's federal and provincial overseers have pencilled in for the next six years is nothing but a "tax grab." Appearing before the Commons Finance Committee last week, Reform leader Preston Manning suggested the government plan amounted to "the single biggest tax hike in Canada's history." But so would Reform's proposed alternative to the CPP, a system of mandatory individual RRSPs. The tax-hike part of the government's package arises from the decision to set aside funds in advance to pay for future pensions, using the return on those funds to cushion the impact when the baby boom generation arrives at retirement age, starting around 2010. By making the boomers, via this more "fully-funded" plan, save a little more for their own retirement, the government hopes to hold contributions to 9.9 per cent of pensionable earnings, rather than the 14 per cent or more that future generations would have to pay under the current "pay-as-you-go" plan, in which the taxes of each generation of workers go to pay the pensions of the last.

But since Reform is also proposing to move to a funded plan -- that's what an RRSP is -- then it, too, is contemplating a substantial increase in the proportion of workers' earnings that must be set aside each year to pay for it: if not quite 9.9 per cent, then not far from it. And since the Reform plan is mandatory, these forced savings must also be classed as "taxes." The only difference is in the destination: instead of sending these contributions to the government, Reform's plan would divert them into workers' own individual RRSPs.

(There is an argument that, since workers could see these funds compounding in their own personal bank accounts, they would be more likely to view them as a sort of deferred benefit, rather than simply as a tax.

As such, they might consider them part of their compensation, and so be less likely to demand an offsetting increase in wages. Which means that Reform's payroll tax increase might not be as harmful to employment as such increases usually are. But it is still an increase in payroll taxes.)

Mind you, Reform does not propose to make current generations pay the full cost of their pensions: they've been paying so little until now that the accumulated obligations have grown far too large to recoup at one go.

Rather, the burden of paying the CPP's "unfunded liability," estimated at about $600-billion, would be spread over several generations. But then, that's true of the government's plan, too.

So when the Finance minister demands to know of Reform what it would do with the unfunded liability, the same question might be asked of him. And when he suggests Reform would have to pay for it out of general revenues -- well, that's exactly what he has done. The new Senior's Benefit, which replaces Old Age Security, will claw back as much as 50 cents for every dollar in other income a pensioner receives -- including CPP benefits. In effect, a good chunk of the CPP's unfunded liability has already been transferred onto the government's books.

Even more hypocritical is the Prime Minister's charge, that the RRSP plan would put pensioners at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market, such as we have seen in recent weeks. "It is one thing for people who invest in the market to weather these kinds of episodes," Jean Chretien said in a speech last week. "But don't subject people who want only the security and predictability of the public system to this." But no one's suggesting we should -- or certainly not Reform. If workers would rather invest their mandatory RRSPs in GICs, they could. Indeed, under similar pension reforms undertaken in other countries, workers who preferred to stick with the public plan were given that option. It is in fact the Liberals who propose to force pensioners to hitch a ride on the stock market, via the proposed CPP Investment Board, which would have a mandate to invest the $100-billion in surplus contributions expected to accumulate within a decade.

That is the only substantive difference between the two plans -- whether those mandatory contributions should be invested in RRSPs, under the control of individuals, or whether they should all be lumped together into One Big Fund, under the control of government. That is where the debate should start.