Mike Kerrigan
Farmers Forum
Having turned 65 this year I reached my target for applying for CPP (Canada Pension Plan) and OAS (Old Age Security) benefits.
About 10 years ago I scribbled some numbers on the back of an envelope that convinced me this was the right age for me to do this. One important factor was I had penciled in an expiry date for me at 93 years old. Once you know your end date it makes the calculations much more meaningful. If I have my expiry date wrong and live longer, that’s a win but if I expire earlier than I think, it’s still a win, as I won’t know what I am missing. In the end everyone will have their own reasons and life factors to make their decision on when to receive these benefits. The Service Canada website has all kinds of tools to calculate what-if scenarios if your pen is out of ink or you have no used envelopes laying around.
I did the CPP application online and, not being the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to online stuff , I was impressed that it worked. Now the OAS application is a different story. The government sent me a paper application for OAS benefits a year in advance plus another follow-up copy almost a year later. I filled it out and mailed it back. Big mistake and, word of cau- tion, if you do mail it, just don’t plan on spending any of it anytime soon. Service Canada’s official response time for mailed applications is five months (150 days). A few weeks ago I came across my paper copy and I realized that I had not received any benefits from OAS yet. So I called them, which was an exercise in itself. When I finally got a person, she politely explained that, yes indeed, they had received my application on April 28 and, yes it was way past the 150 day response time, but not to worry she would have it expedited. I was amazed that 210 days after they received it, it had not been approved. Nowadays, it seems to me a good number of people are calling on our governments to manage more and more aspects of our daily lives. Based on my OAS experience, plus a few other interactions, I am not so sure that is the right direction to go.
A neighbour that we barely know, living on the next concession over, has one sow and wanted to know if he could buy a couple bottles of semen to artificially inseminate his sow. No problem but I made him aware that, due to our biosecurity concerns, we could have no contact with the sow and he would have to administer the semen. He said his 12-year-old son had learned how in a 4-H class and he would call when the sow was in heat. Christmas night the call came and they picked up the goods. I mentioned that if he had any problems to call and I would talk him through it. He did call and we worked it out over the phone. The deal was if the sow gets pregnant he would pay our cost for the rods and semen.
We will know in 21 days if it was successful and I am thinking when he calls I will kindly ask him if he would take our place on Statistics Canada list when they request our swine inventory numbers. It would be so much easier as he would have his numbers right in his head and it would take a lot less time for the Statistics Canada agent to record his inventory than ours. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me.
Mike Kerrigan is a pork producer at Glencoe, Ont.
