2. Patricia McCardle welcomed everyone to the meeting. She introduced the Executive.
3. Moved by Barb Burleigh and seconded by Sherrill Barwise that the Agenda, with the addition of a CUSO presentation, be approved. Motion Carried
4. Moved by Eric Gallant and seconded by James MacAulay that the minutes of the November 3, 2011 PEIRTA AGM be approved. Motion Carried
5. Business Arising from the minutes: Clarification was given on the definition of pre-existing conditions. It is recommended that members have a letter of proof of insurance before travelling to certain countries. The increase of life insurance from $10,000 to $15,000 will cost $9.00 more per year in premiums, but the rate remains unchanged at 90 cents per $1,000.
6. Correspondence: Patricia wrote a letter to Prime Minister Harper to publicly affirm that any negotiations for the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) will respect the Canadian Health Act, will not negatively impact Education, Pensions, and Water Rights, and will in no way abrogate the current rights of Provincial governments. A response was received stating that Canada is committed.
7. Treasurer’s Report:
Balance October 31, 2012: $6,513.83
Income: $28,796.71
Expenses: $24,528.95
Balance: $4,267.76
Moved by Ann Ledgerwood and seconded by Carol Raynor that the November 8, 2012 Financial Statement be approved. Motion Carried
A detailed Financial Statement to November 8, 2012 is attached as Appendix 5 to these minutes.
8. President’s Report: President Patricia McCardle’s Report was presented and is attached as Appendix 1 to these minutes.
9. Senior College Presentation: Ron Kelly, one of three coordinators with the seniors’ College, a non profit organization affiliated with UPEI, gave a general description of the college. He invited retired teachers to participate as members and also provide their services as facilitators. Membership is $135 for an unlimited number of courses and anyone fifty years or over qualifies. Website is www.seniorscollege.ca.
10. PEITF President Gilles Arsenault: PEITF President Gilles Arsenault addressed the meeting and brought greetings from PEITF. He stated that PEI
teachers are the envy of others across Canada, having a good working relationship with government. The Federation is busy with several issues:
• Substitute teachers negotiating a contract through PEITF
• Legal issues are on the increase
• Pension issues
• Kindergarten integration into the system
• Amalgamation of the two English Boards
• Hiring of Deputy General Secretary was a necessity
11. Group Insurance Report: Kimball Blanchard reported on behalf of the insurance trustees. His report was published in the last RTA news letter and is attached as appendix 3 to these minutes.
12. Pension Committee Report & Master Trust: John Rowe, Chair of the Pension Committee, forwarded his regrets for his absence to give the Pension Committee report. Michel Plamondon gave a verbal report on the status of the Teachers’ pension and Master Trust. He explained that committees are struck to make recommendations to deal with pension issues.
13. Memorial for deceased members Sheridyth MacNeill lead the service:
Deceased |
Flowers carried by |
14. Newsletter Report: Marg Stewart gave a verbal report.
15. Web Site: Bill Oehlke sends his regrets for his absence as he was out of the province.
16. Membership Committee Report: Joyce McCardle presented her report and is attached as Appendix 2 to these minutes.
17. ACER-CART: James MacAulay, recently elected Eastern Regional Director of ACER-CART, gave an overview of the organization. His full report is attached as
appendix 6 to these minutes.
18. Resolutions:
1) Whereas Policy 4.4.1 states each year a scholarship be awarded to a worthy Island student entering the UPEI Bed program,
Be it resolved that Policy 4.4.1 be amended to state one scholarship is awarded to a student entering the second year of the Bed program at UPEI and who has
attended a Prince Edward Island school in their secondary education years.
Moved by James MacAulay and seconded by George Knox. Carried
2) Whereas Policy 4.4.2 states each year a prize of $500.00 shall be awarded to a worthy Island student graduating from the Bed program at UPEI, Be it resolved that Policy 4.4.2 be amended to state one prize, valued at $500.00, will be awarded each year to a student graduating from the Bed program at UPEI and who has attended a Prince Edward Island school in their secondary education years. Moved by James MacAulay and seconded by Sheridyth MacNeill. Carried.
3) Whereas we have a prize and a scholarship granted to Bed students at UPEI and whereas Holland College is a post-secondary education facility in PEI, Be it resolved that a $300.00 bursary be awarded to a student entering the 2nd year in the Early Childhood Care and Education program at Holland College and who attended a Prince Edward Island high school in their secondary education years. Moved by James MacAulay and seconded by Maureen MacNeill. Carried.
4) Whereas: the editor puts in many hours preparing the newsletter of members for a small remuneration. Be it resolved that the honorarium for the newsletter editor be raised from $500/year to $750/year. Moved by Joyce McCardle and seconded by John MacNally. Carried. This resolution will be taken back to the Executive for consideration and if carried will be brought to the next AGM for approval.
19. Presentation of the 2013 Financial Budget: Moved by Ann Ledgerwood and seconded by Helene Garg that the 2012 Financial Budget as circulated be approved. Motion Carried Her report is attached as Appendix 4 to these minutes.
20. CUSO Presentation: Kate Martin and Mary Hickey, two delegates from CUSO gave a Presentation on their activities. They invited teachers to consider CUSO as a second career with information brochures.
21. Moved by Joyce McCardle and seconded by Maureen MacNeill that the meeting adjourn.
Appendix 1
PRESIDENT’S REPORT
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND RETIRED TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION
NOVEMBER 08. 2012 SUMMERSIDE LEGION
Let me begin by expressing my gratitude for being given the privilege and opportunity to serve as The Prince Edward Island Retired Teachers’ Association, President, for the past year. It is not difficult to serve as President if you have an executive and committee structure with foresight and a keen work ethic to get things done. Our executive and committee members have been a tremendous source of strength and vision for our association and to me as President.
As you are aware we have six standing committees all of which are very active. A little later in the meeting the chairperson of each committee will be reporting to you the activities of their committee. Michel Plamondon will also be giving a report on the Master Trust. Thus I will not be covering any of their report areas.
As I indicated in the newsletter James MacAulay was elected to the ACER-CART executive as East Rep. for the next year. This includes the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec. Since we are lucky to have Jim on our executive He will be bring a few words later from ACER-CART.
At the meeting in Ottawa the Atlantic Reps. were brought up to date on our next CAPRTO meeting which was held on Oct. 10 & 11 in Dieppe. The two New Brunswick organizations were the organizers. We will now be known as ECRTO (Eastern Canada Retired Teachers Organization). All groups had reps and attending this meeting from PEIRTA was Sheridyth MacNeill, Joyce McCardle and me. The time was not convenient for other Executive members. We started at 1 pm on Wednesday and finished on Thursday at 12 noon. There were three presentations and a review of each of our organizations. Presenters were Dale Weldon on Atlantic Retired Teachers’ Benefit Plan Comparison (There are a few difference in plans but ours is very strong). The Second speaker was Duncan Matheson on Lobbying. He reviewed several steps to effective lobbying. (Many could be followed in any meeting situation) and the final presenter was Mike McBane on Pharmacare. He did a comparison from across Canada and showed why we need a Universal Pharmacare program for the benefit of all Canadians. All presentations were interesting and gave a few options to follow. We finished with a review of a few common concerns; adding new members, fees and insurance. The next ECRTO will be in 2015 in NS,
As you know the Executive meets every month except, May, July and August. Since I travel whenever the opportunity arises it makes for some date judgingly to meet all dates. Sheridyth only had to chair one meeting for me this pass year. The monthly meetings are usually quite standard with interesting groups sometimes doing short presentations to get an article on our web page. It was here that we passed a couple of motions. One was to add to our contingency fund by $4000. This brings it to about $ 9200. Still a little way from a yearly budget.
Another motion was to place $2160 in a GIC until UPEI was able to change the wording of our prize and scholarship to education students. That happened after a few meetings with Rosemary O’Malley Keys on the wording. The scholarship was mainly funded by the endowment from the book “Teachers Remember” in 1989. This scholarship had dropped from $1000 to $500 so the executive has been adding to it to bring it up to $800. This year we brought it up to $1000. The endowment if we can afford it will be added to each year until it reaches around $1000 in interest. It took UPEI a little while to meet our request after they updated their polices on awards. We believed our criteria were for a PEI student. This was not so and no paper work could be found at UPEI stating this. Finally Jim found the motion from 1989 that did not state a PEI student must receive the scholarship. We now have the terms as close as we can get them to state the scholarship will be awarded to a student entering the Second & final year of the BEd program at UPEI who has attended a Prince Edward Island High School in their secondary education years. The prize has same requirements. A copy of each document is on file at UPEI and PEIRTA. I attended the Deans’ Academic Honors & Awards night on Oct. 1th to present the scholarship to Angela Poirier, Grand River.
As I stated in the newsletter we are invited to all UPEI Dept. of Education functions and are always recognized for attendance and our continued interest in education on PEI. I attended the May dinner to present the prize to a graduation student and the Education Department All Years Reunion in July.
We have two organizations to give a big thank you to for their support as in the past. The first The PEITF who treats us like one of their own. We hold our monthly meetings at their building and use their address as ours. The secretary staff of Marion, Lisa, and Sheila is great to work with. PEITF support us also with a $1500 annually donation. Also I had to talk to Michel a few time to acquire answers for questions put to me by our members. If you ever have a question He is always willing to hear you out and try to answer your concerns. As I also said in one of my articles I attended both PEITF pre-retirement sessions. It was nice to review the steps we all went through to get full retirement. I get a few minutes to bring greetings from the RTA and encourage them to become members. I was amazed how many participations I knew from my career. I also attended the PEITF AGM meeting lunch. Anyone that knows me knows I never turn down a meal invitation.
The other group to give us support is Johnson Inc. Under the leadership of Edna Reid in the past and we are hoping it will continue under the leadership of Manon Sirois-Boudreau in the Dieppe office. They have added to our budget by $4500 annually, have our newsletter’s labels printed for us, and donated a prize to each social. Edna wanted me to apologize to Prince County for missing giving a prize. Both she and I were a little at fault since I forgot to give her the date. Edna has given up her contract with Johnson to work full time on her own business. She always was willing to meet with us at any time we called. We wise her great success in her business.
We were invited to the Western School board retirement dinner. Since I was out of the province Joyce McCardle represented us at the event.
We held the three county socials in May. A few eats and words were enjoyed by all who attended each gathering. The Executive has a great discussion after May on what we can do to entice members to attend, this year we had about 25 members at each social of which the executive were 8 attendees. We tried newspaper ads, being on TV with Boomer and this year it ran each of the 5 days before Prince County Social in weekly happenings in the Journal. We know we have to have something at this time because our county Reps are elected at this event. So far we have not come up with anything more interesting. If any of you have any ideas please forward to one of us to give it a try. The county rep. does the work for the socials and would like to see more join us.
To finish I must say I did not believe Jim when He would say the President had many commitments throughout the year. I kept a record this pass year of events I attended only in Charlottetown since I get $5 mileage check and we need the completed record for our budget review and it was 20 in all. Some were just an hour but a few were a day or a half day. One day event was the Atlantic Seniors College conference. As I said it was interesting to hear a few of their concerns were the same as ours. You will hear a short presentation after my report by Don Andersons, Ron Kelly and George Lyle.
As some of you are aware I have started to attend a few School Retirement Gatherings. From now on you will hopefully see a picture of each in the newsletter as long as I remember to take my camera. It is amazing how many of these gathering are held on the first Tuesday of the months. I find it very interesting to meet these groups. Again amazing how many members I do remember. Hopefully I will get to a few more in the next year.
In closing let me say that I look forward to a good meeting today. It is really a pleasure to work with an executive and chairs who take their roles seriously. For me it has been a great growing experience with each event I have taken part in as your president also the writing of articles for newsletters and PEITF newsletter. I I hope that when you leave today you will be able to say that you gained some new insights and a final reminder that next year we will be looking for a new executive so we hope some of you will consider one of the positions.
Thank You,
Patricia McCardle, President
Appendix 2
RTA AGM Membership Report
Submitted by Joyce McCardle
November 8, 2012
? There are 1510 retired teachers on PEI; 974 are members of PEIRTA; which means 536 retired teachers are not members of our association. I’m open to ideas
of how to get these people on board.
? 28 new membership cards were sent out in September; we only send cards out once a year as it is too costly to send them out at differing times.
In the coming year, we will send out non-laminated cards as needed with the laminated ones going out in September. Occasionally I will misspell a name or get it
wrong in some way; this, too, will be corrected the following Sept.
? We have 18 deceased members this year; the board will be passed around for additional names if we have missed anyone. If you know one of the deceased
members, please put your name beside that person to carry a carnation in memory.
Deceased members are |
Flowers carried by |
Appendix 3
Group Insurance Report
Submitted by Kimball Blanchard
During the spring of this year the PEITF Group Insurance Trustees went to the market and sought bids from insurance companies on the various aspects of our plan. During this process a review of our plan was carried out as well. After reviewing all the bids offered by the various companies, the Trustees decided to retain all the present carriers but, as a result of the process, a number of changes were initiated. The Trustees found that all the health and life programs were in a positive financial position and because of this decided to initiate some rate reductions for the upcoming year. Some of these reductions apply to features of the program that apply to active teachers, but there were also reductions which apply to members of the RTA.
For RTA members, rates for health insurance for individual coverage will go from $137.95 to $127.65 per month, and for family coverage the rate will go from $280.58 to $260.12 per month. The rates for the basic life insurance which retired teachers can retain until they reach the age of 65 have been reduced from $0.211per $1000 per month to $0.155 per $1000 per month. The amount of coverage a retiree has under this plan is the amount she/he had at retirement.
For retirees over 65 who have life insurance, the major change is that the amount of coverage has been increased from $10,000 to $15,000. The rate for this coverage has been decreased from $0.81 to $0.588 per $1000 per month. Combined, these changes (decrease in rate per $1000 coverage together with an increase in coverage) will result in retirees paying slightly more for life insurance— $.72 more per month, or, a yearly increase of $8.64.
For retirees who have retained some voluntary accidental death and dismemberment coverage there has also been a rate reduction. The single rate was decreased from $0.03 per $1,000 of coverage to $0.019 per $1,000 of coverage, and the family rate was decreased from $0.045 per $1,000 of coverage to $0.031 per $1,000 of coverage. These rates were proposed by the carriers and are effective for the current year. They will be reviewed By the trustees after a year to determine whether our plan can sustain these lower rates, and the Trustees will make the necessary adjustments. For the current year the lower rates are good news and hopefully they can be carried into the future.
As well as lowering the rates for various components of the plan, the Trustees decided to improve vision care coverage to 80% of $200 to a maximum of $160. Also, they decided to provide coverage for continuous glucose monitoring, sensors and transmitters.
While we have had a good year financially in our group insurance plan, our members must continue to be diligent as to how the plan is used. Be sure to check that you are covered under the provincial Drug Cost Assistance Program (DCAP) when you turn 65. As well, be aware that if you are prescribed any drug that is covered under DCAP you do not pay anything out of your own pocket. The cost of the drug is covered by DCAP and the dispensing fee is paid by your plan. For any medication not covered by DCAP but covered by our plan, remember that the co-pay is 20% of the cost of the drug to a maximum of $10.00. You should never pay more than $10.00, and if the total cost of the prescription is less than $50.00 you should only pay 20% of the total.
We have heard that Some pharmacies have been putting a surcharge on the cost of medication, but you should not pay it.
Some prescription drugs fall into a special category under DCAP and they require a special authorization form to be completed and authorized before DCAP will pay. We have a First Fill Free policy for these types of medications. That is, you will receive the first fill of the prescription from the pharmacy, but you must have the form completed before the prescription can be refilled. Your Pharmacist should have the information on these medications. Check!
A line item in the last provincial budget indicated that the DCAP plan may be changed so that Government would become the second payer and our plan would then become responsible for many more drug costs than at present. This would have a major effect on our plan and it is something the RTA is watching closely. As we are coming to the time of year that many of you travel, be sure to check with Johnson Insurance or Medavie Blue Cross before you undertake any trips. Be aware of The pre-existing condition clause in the travel insurance part of the plan, and if you have any questions about your health status or changes in medications be sure they are answered before you depart. Our travel insurance is usually adequate for most travel, but you must be informed. Also, some countries require that you have evidence of health insurance before you can be admitted into The country. You should also check on this.
A new coverage initiated under our plan last year was for critical illness insurance. This coverage is available in various amounts and is available to active and retired teachers. A number of retirees have opted to purchase this coverage; if you would like to learn more about it, contact Johnson Insurance.
While costs in the area of health coverage continue to rise, we have been able to maintain our program reasonably well. Continue to be aware that the plan is our plan and we must all do our part to ensure that it will continue to be available to our members at rates that are sustainable.
Any questions can be directed to Johnson Insurance, Medavie Blue Cross, or Michel Plamondon at the PEITF office.
Appendix 4
PEI RETIRED TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION INC. PROPOSED BUDGET 2012/2013
Submitted by Ann Ledgerwood
Projected Income: |
Schedule a | Schedule B |
Projected Expenses: |
Amount: |
Amount: |
Appendix 5
RETIRED TEACHERS’ FINANCIAL STATEMENT, NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Balance October 31, 2012 $ 6,513.83
INCOME: Teachers’ Superannuation $ 11, 594.00
Johnsons’ Contribution to Newsletter $ 4,500.00
PEITF $ 1,500.00
Web Fees $ 100.00
AGM Registration 2011 $ 1,985.00
County Socials $ 435.00
GIC Redemption (Scotiabank) $ 2,168.88
Investment Certificate (Scotiabank) $ 9,169.42
TOTAL INCOME: $ 28,796.71
EXPENSES:
ACER-CART Expenses $ 1,254.85
ACER-CART Dues $ 340.90
UPEI Scholarship/Bursary $ 2,935.00
Office Supplies/Membership Cards $ 152.49
Executive Travel/Meals $ 5,047.37
Newsletter Costs (Printing, Postage, Envelopes) $ 3,048.43
Bank Fees and Cheque costs $ 58.72
County Socials $ 764.76
PEITF Reception $ 57.40
GIC Purchase ($4000 & $2160) $ 6,160.00
AGM 2011 $ 2,959.03
Honoraria (President $1000; Editor $500; Web Master $250) $ 1,750.00
TOTAL EXPENSES $ 24,528.95
TOTAL INCOME – TOTAL EXPENSES: ($28,796.71 - $24,528.95 = 4,267.76)
BALANCE: $ 4,267.76
Respectfully Submitted: Ann Ledgerwood, Treasurer
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