Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan

A pension plan has existed for Ontario teachers since 1917. Today, the plan’s members include 183,000 teachers in elementary and secondary schools in Ontario, and 148,000 pensioners. The plan has one of Canada’s largest payrolls with $6.7 billion in benefits paid to plan members, and $3.2 billion received in total contributions from teachers, the provincial government and designated employers in 2020. Before 1990, the plan was administered by the Ontario government and restricted to investing in non-marketable Province of Ontario debentures. In 1990, the government established the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board as a corporation overseen by an independent board. Ontario Teachers' is a defined benefit plan co-sponsored by the Ontario government through the Ministry of Education and the Ontario Teachers’ Federation (OTF) representing plan members. The plan sponsors are equally responsible for plan gains and losses. A six-member Partners' Committee is responsible for setting contribution rates and benefit levels in the plan. Ontario Teachers’ member services team is committed to providing Ontario’s working and retired teachers with prompt, reliable pension services and information using web-based technologies alongside personal service offered by approximately 45 pension benefits specialists. We measure members’ satisfaction with our services and have achieved consistently high ratings from plan members – 8.8 out of 10 in 2020. Our investment team is equally committed to excellence and innovation. When we started investing in financial markets in 1990, the fund had net assets of $18.5 billion. Today, it has grown to $221.2 billion, representing an annualized return of 9.6% since 1990. The fund’s investments are well diversified with equities (public and private), bonds, commodities, real assets (real estate, infrastructure and timberland) and absolute return strategies. We manage risk carefully, reflecting the plan’s maturity and decreasing risk tolerance, and focus on outperforming the markets in which we invest.