Proudly serving healthcare workers since 1960

We have served the healthcare community for over 60 years. We were established in 1960 with the participation of 71 hospitals. We have since grown to be the pension plan provider of choice for Ontario’s healthcare community with more than 670 participating employers and over 460,000 members.

Since inception, our mission has remained unchanged: to deliver on our pension promise to Ontario’s healthcare workers. The Plan has maintained a more than fully funded status since 2009. This means that it has more assets than it owes in current and future pension benefits.

Explore our Annual Results

Check out our current and past Annual Results for more detailed information.

Enhancing retirement security for our members

We proudly support our members while striving to improve their retirement security. The Plan’s ongoing strength combined with our overall operating costs, which compare favourably to similar Canadian pension plans, has helped make it possible for HOOPP’s Board of Trustees to approve several enhancements to our members’ pensions.

See some key highlights:

Successful investment approach

Our liability driven investing (LDI) approach, which considers the Plan’s assets in relation to how much the Plan owes in pensions, has helped us successfully weather tumultuous markets in the past, including the 2008 recession and the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. LDI is a long-term strategy which aligns with HOOPP's investment approach and will continue to evolve while serving our mission of delivering on our pension promise.

Using this LDI approach, our investment team has a long history of strong performance. Even through periods of market volatility, our long-term investment view, diversified portfolios and strong liquidity position allow us to effectively navigate changing markets. As a result, we can find opportunities in all types of environments, and be buyers when others are sellers.

We understand what our liabilities look like 50, 60 and 70 years into the future and invest with the goal of paying pensions to our members over that time horizon. While we make investment decisions on short-, mid- and long-term horizons, we’re focused on the long-term health of the Plan, not single year returns.

Consistently healthy funded status

Funded status compares the Plan’s assets to its liabilities (i.e., pension obligations), and is a key measure of the current financial health of the Plan. While the funded status can fluctuate from year to year based on several factors, HOOPP has been more than fully funded since 2009. We adjust our investment strategies to changing market conditions to guard against potential downturns.

For regulatory filing purposes, we report our funded status on a smoothed asset value basis. The asset smoothing approach we use gradually recognizes the Fund’s investment returns over 5 years, only partially recognizing the most recent annual return. This approach minimizes the impact of market volatility in any one year and helps the Plan avoid making decisions based on short-term market fluctuations.

In the graph below, the Plan’s net and smoothed assets have been charted against its pension liabilities over time.

Learn more about our current funded status in our latest Annual Report.

History of strong investment returns

Our long track record of strong investment returns has helped keep the Plan fully funded and its contribution rates affordable, for both our members and their employers, and thereby sustainable in the long term. HOOPP has been able to maintain the same contribution rates since 2004.

The table below shows investment performance for 2023 and 2022, as well as the 10-year and 20-year performance of the Fund.

*Benchmarks are established to measure the performance of investment strategies relative to the risk taken.

Further contributing to the goal of meeting the pension promise, our investment strategies are implemented in a cost-efficient manner. Our total operating costs were $418 million, or 39 basis points of our average net assets available for benefits, an increase from 32 basis points in 2022. Based on publicly available information, HOOPP’s operating costs continue to compare reasonably to other Canadian pension plans.