The appellants, former employees whose employment was terminated following a corporate restructuring, appealed the dismissal of their application for supplementary retirement benefits under a supplementary executive retirement plan (SERP).
Following a partial wind-up of the registered pension plan, the appellants became entitled to statutory 'grow-in' benefits, allowing them to retire at age 55 with unreduced pensions.
The dispute centered on whether the SERP's formula required excluding these grow-in benefits when calculating their supplementary entitlement.
The Court of Appeal upheld the application judge's interpretation, which relied on expert actuarial evidence to conclude that the SERP's proviso mandated the exclusion of grow-in benefits from the base calculation but not from the deduction of earned registered benefits, resulting in a nil supplementary entitlement.
