When Quebec Premier Jean Lesage unveiled his plan for a provincial pension scheme at a first ministers conference in 1964, Prime Minister Lester Pearson was so impressed he turned to the Quiet Revolutionary and cracked: Jean, may we opt in to your plan?

Were those two nation builders to meet today, the conversation might go quite differently. It might even end in this: Lester, may we opt in to yours?

Now in their forties, the Canada and Quebec pension plans find themselves on very different trajectories. One is comparatively robust, well capitalized and better managed than ever. The other is under severe pressure, squeezed by ugly demographics and steep investment losses.

The Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) is reeling from a 26.4-per-cent loss in 2008, the largest decline among the 25 pension and insurance funds managed by the equally hard-up Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Did the QPP, which defines its own investment policy, push the Caisse to take excessive risks on its behalf? Or was it the other way around?

QPP president André Trudeau will face those questions Thursday when he takes the hot seat at the National Assembly’s public finance committee, which is a holding a marathon of hearings into the Caisse’s disastrous $40-billion loss in 2008.

But that is so last year. The real disaster facing the QPP lies in its future. Without action soon, it either risks insolvency or having to soak the next generation of Quebec workers to pay not only for their meagre pensions but for those of the ageless baby boomers who will keep on ticking way longer than their forebears ever did.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The simultaneous creation of the QPP and the Caisse marked Quebec’s declaration of economic independence. In the eyes of its creators, Jacques Parizeau among them, the QPP was more than a pension plan. It was the justification for the Caisse, providing it with the seed money that would allow francophone Quebec to take control of its economy.

The QPP — unlike the Canada Pension Plan — was not set up as a pay as you go scheme where annual contribution rates were simply set high enough to cover benefits in any given year. Instead, employee and employer levies were invested in the Quebec economy. It worked so well that, three decades later, Ottawa moved to apply the idea nationally with the 1997 creation of the CPP Investment Board.

While their investment policies have differed, the QPP and CPP have kept contributions and benefits at the same levels. Each pays retirees about a quarter of their preretirement earnings, up to a maximum of $46,300 in 2009. This eases labour mobility within Canada.

It can’t go on. Even before the QPP’s devastating $9-billion loss in 2008, it was facing depletion by mid-century. Now, what’s left of its nest egg will be gone by 2037. In actuarial terms, that’s like next Friday.

At the current contribution rate of 9.9 per cent — split equally between workers and their employers — the QPP will begin dipping into its reserves to pay benefits as early as next year. The CPP faces no such pressure. At the same contribution rate, its reserves are projected to grow significantly in coming decades.

What’s driving this divergence? Quebec has proportionately more boomers than the rest of Canada, the legacy of those double-digit, Céline Dion-sized families that once proliferated. Just as important, however, was its subsequent baby bust, which has put the province’s worker-to-retiree ratio on a scarily steep slope downward. The number of working-age Quebeckers will soon begin to decline, while rising moderately in the rest of the country for years to come.

Immigration and the most generous parental leave program anywhere can’t reverse this trend. Though Quebec’s share of immigrants arriving in Canada has increased to 17 per cent from about 13 per cent a few years ago, the province remains the most consistent loser in tallies of interprovincial migration. Many among the thousands who leave Quebec each year for other provinces are highly skilled immigrants who were counted among the incoming only a few years earlier.

The parental insurance scheme adopted in 2006 has helped boost the birth rate noticeably — to 1.74 children for each woman of child-bearing age. But it’s not enough to make a demographic dent, given other trends. And it does not come cheap, at $1.5-billion a year and rising. Quebec employers pay 0.68 per cent in payroll levies to finance the program, employees 0.48 per cent. But the rates will be rising annually for the foreseeable future.

QPP contribution rates will likely be increasing soon, too. The only other credible option is a visit by Jean Charest to 24 Sussex Dr. and a heartfelt: Stephen, may we opt in to your plan?

All right, then, QPP rate hikes it is.