Evan Howard – CAAT Pension Plan

“We have had tremendous growth since launching DBplus, an innovative workplace pension structure that provides members with inflation-indexed lifetime income in retirement, all at a fixed employer cost,” Evan Howard emphasizes while discussing the Toronto-based CAAT Pension Plan.

Evan Howard | CAAT Pension Plan | Chief Pension Officer

Since launching DBplus six years ago, the plan has doubled its membership to private, non-profit and broader public sector employers. Established in 1967, CAAT has grown to over $20 billion in assets, with 100,000-plus members from more than 450 participating employers across Canada.

As General Counsel for over a dozen years, before his recent transition to Chief Pension Officer, Howard has been sorting out the details and keeping tabs on the Canadian regulatory framework through which CAAT has innovated and grown. By later this year, CAAT will launch its latest offering to members, the GROWTHplus Investment Account. This optional savings account will allow Plan members to grow their tax-sheltered retirement savings alongside their lifetime pension income from CAAT. Any additional funds a member chooses to allocate to GROWTHplus will benefit from CAAT’s investment returns—meaning members can benefit from an asset mix structured for long-term performance through a diversified portfolio, including public and private equity. This approach to investments has yielded the Plan a 10-year annualized net rate of return of 9.3 percent as of the end of 2023.

It’s all part of what Howard says is CAAT’s commitment to its members, which includes continuously improving benefit security and value and innovating to better serve members’ needs. Because of this and the ingenuity of its fixed-rate modern defined benefit pension, CAAT is attracting more and more interest outside of Canada, including international businesses with Canadian-based employees.

Howard and his team often engage with employers seeking to join to explain how the Plan benefits employers. According to him, CAAT’s funding policy and Canadian pension legislation for plans structured like CAAT impose no residual liability on employers participating in CAAT. This makes CAAT attractive from other plan designs, as it allows employers to get more value for their benefits spend and focus on their core business while allowing them to better attract and retain the talent they need.

From sea to sea

CAAT continues to grow across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nurturing partnerships in every province and territory. According to Howard, with expansion comes greater legal complexity as each province has slightly different rules—but by building systems and processes, CAAT continues to meet its high standards and fulfill its fiduciary duties to its members. In his new position, he’s assumed the responsibilities of the communications and service delivery teams. Howard now oversees more than 200 direct and indirect reports and cites the need to build and empower teams.

“I believe people work best when they have direction through objectives and principles as opposed to micromanagement,” he says. “It’s about ensuring all staff have the appropriate skills and a full understanding of the objectives and barriers so that they are empowered to make informed and appropriate decisions to move the business forward—all the while knowing they have my support. In military speak, it’s a mission command structure.”

Howard says such a modus operandi allows CAAT to continue to meet the dynamic growth challenge by enhancing individual and team capacity and responsibility.

An example of this is how CAAT’s growth has, in part, been through mergers with other pension plans. While most new employers join on a prospective basis, enabling their employees to earn a secure lifetime pension, some employers have past pension liabilities they are looking to derisk and get such liability off their books by merging their plan into CAAT. This has seen Howard’s team work on 30-plus such mergers, resulting in over $1.5 billion in assets being transferred into the Plan.

“Each merger is unique,” says Howard, “and this means our teams work closely with pension regulators across the country to ensure that such mergers are approved by all concerned.”

“That’s something that only can be done if our people have a shared understanding of the Plan’s strategic goals, and with clear objectives and guiding principles enabling them to problem-solve,” Howard says, adding that by allowing his reports such appropriate authority, he can devote more time to strategic planning, addressing challenges and anticipating needs and issues. “They can be agile and adaptive knowing they have my support and vice versa.”

In growth mode

The momentum is favorable for growth, says Howard, who’s had a strong hand in fostering it since joining CAAT. Over that time, he has seen CAAT’s 50-person staff increase 10-fold.

Howard says his role feels natural and that, after close to 20 years in private practice, he felt the need for a new challenge. When CAAT’s CEO  approached him with the opportunity to fill a new role with the Plan,  Howard was eager to take it on and develop a new skill set in management; the choice was easy.

“I thought this was such a great opportunity for me to develop my corporate management and leadership skills in an organization that was at the beginning of its growth journey, and I’d have to say it’s come to fruition,” he says. This goes beyond the legal focus and into managing a diverse array of teams, from legal to communications to service delivery.”

Besides, he continues, there’s something about the pension world that’s appealed to him since the early 1990s when he was studying law at the University of Western Ontario. Pension law was a relatively new subject, but a professor there had started such a curriculum, and Howard rightfully gauged pension expertise as a skill set that would be in demand.

“I’ve always been good at numbers, but so much of pension law isn’t just numbers,” he says. “It’s about the rights and obligations of employers, members and, in particular, the administrators who have the fiduciary duty to carry it all out.”

Howard has been so entrusted and considers CAAT to be the most consequential role in a distinguished career that, from 1998 to 2000, had him dealing with pensions and benefits on a wide array of mergers and acquisitions with global heavyweight Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London. Meanwhile, his wife, a fellow University of Western Ontario law graduate and counsel in the pension and benefits industry, was studying for her master’s degree.

Upon returning to Ontario, Howard logged nearly a decade at the Toronto firm of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, becoming a partner in 2004 before moving to Norton Rose Fulbright in 2010 and then to CAAT.

Down on the farm

But pensions and benefits aren’t all Howard and his wife are about, and while they make their home amidst the hustle and bustle of Canada’s most populous and skyscraper-filled city, they’ve bought a farm in bucolic Bobcaygeon 160 kilometers to the northeast.

As the late Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip sang, it’s in Bobcaygeon where the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time. For Howard and his wife, it’s where they’ve been raising poultry and assorted livestock during the past three years. Howard says there’s nothing like farm-fresh eggs, and yes, indeed, the constellations are impressive away from the big city and its bright lights.

He chuckles at the idea of him and his wife being Oliver and Lisa on “Green Acres” reruns. At least for the foreseeable future, farming remains a hobby, and given the busy schedules of this man and woman, their time in Bobcaygeon can be limited.

But he says it’s also satisfying to see a pension plan sprout to the advantage of CAAT’s growing membership and enable the process to remain first on his to-do list.

“At CAAT, we’re continuing to grow and build for the long term,” Howard says. “We’re driven to sustain this model for the next 50 years and beyond.”