Skip to Main Content
Doug LeFaive

Doug LeFaive

Partner

Biography

Trustees of multi-employer pension plans rely on Doug LeFaive to help them navigate the complicated and highly-regulated world of running a target-benefit pension plan, and to meet the high standards the law requires of them.

Doug’s clients include both jointly-trusteed and union-trusteed plans, including some with members and Trustees from more than one union. He also represents trustees of health and welfare plans. Doug enjoys advising trustees on how to reconcile and apply often-conflicting provincial and federal pension laws to ensure that all members are treated equitably, and how to avoid unnecessary court and regulatory proceedings.

While representing the Trustees of multi-employer, target-benefit pension plans, Doug:

  • convinced New Brunswick to permit his client to apply the pension legislation of British Columbia to that plan’s New Brunswick members so they could avoid the benefit reductions otherwise required
  • made multiple presentations to Quebec’s pension regulator, which ultimately lead to the complete rewriting of that province’s pension legislation for multi-employer pension plans
  • successfully divided three multi-jurisdictional, multi-employer pension plans, with members in eight different provinces, in accordance with the then-draft Agreement Respecting Multi-Jurisdictional Pension Plans
  • assisted an Ontario-registered, multi-employer plan in growing from less than 25,000 members to more than 88,000 members and pensioners while increasing its assets from about $300 million to more than $2.4 billion

Doug also represents unions and individual plan members in pension plan disputes and ensures that his clients receive everything they are legally-entitled to receive, and sometimes more.

Doug is a former journalist, and offshore oilfield worker, who was called to the Ontario bar in 2000 after articling at the firm. He is a member of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario’s Technical Advisory Committee for Multi-Employer Pension Plans.