With $96.4 billion in net assets at December 31, 2009, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (Teachers’) is the largest single-profession pension plan in Canada. An independent organization, it invests the pension fund’s assets and administers the pensions of 289,000 active and retired teachers in Ontario.
A pension plan has existed for Ontario teachers since 1917. Today, the plan’s members include 175,000 teachers in elementary and secondary schools in Ontario, 114,000 pensioners, and 69,000 inactive members. The plan has one of Canada’s largest payrolls with $4.4 billion in benefits paid to plan members, and $2.7 billion received in total contributions from teachers, the provincial government and designated employers in 2009.
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 a nine-member board.
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 50 Pension Benefits Specialists. We measure members’ satisfaction with our services and have achieved consistently high ratings from plan members – 9.1 out of 10 at the end of 2009.
Our investment team is equally committed to excellence and innovation. When we started investing in financial markets in 1990, the fund stood at $19 billion. Today, it has grown to $96.4 billion representing an average annual rate of return of 9.7% since 1990.
The fund’s investments are well diversified using an asset mix of equities (public and private), inflation-sensitive investments (real-return bonds, real estate, infrastructure, and timberland, and commodities) and fixed income 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. Since 1990, the investment team has generated $19.2 billion more than market benchmarks.