FREDERICTON, N.B. – Nelson Michaud didn’t expect to spend his retirement fighting.
“We’re older people, we paid all our lives for our pension, and if the government comes and steals it away, it’s not fair. I’ve been retired for 15 years, they shouldn’t touch our pension,” he said.
Michaud is part of Pension Coalition NB, a group of 13,000 public service retirees taking the Province to court. They say the move to a shared-risk pension model has made life difficult for pensioners on an already tight income.
The case has been years in the making. Last year, retirees protested in the hundreds in front of the N.B. Legislature, and successfully made pension reform an election issue.
“So a government that doesn’t recognize the value of those that preceded them shouldn’t be governing,” he said.
The group filed an application against the province in June.
The case was in a Fredericton courtroom Monday, where Crown lawyers argued the pensioners haven’t made the correct method in launching the legal action.
They said the lawsuit was presented as an application, and while it might be quicker, it doesn’t have a period of discovery of evidence before the court date.
Crown Attorney Stephen Hutchison said it should have been presented as an action, and based on this glitch in procedure, he asked the Judge to dismiss the case.
Justice Terrence Morrison has reserved his decision until sometime in October.
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