Well, the federal government does stand out for the size of the discount rate that it's using, and also because it's using that discount rate to value promises that are unconditional. An unconditional promise is quite different from the promise that you would see in a shared-risk pension plan, such as you would see in the broader public sector in many of the provinces, where the participants in the plan know that, if circumstances don't work out well, they might have a reduction in their benefits. For example, they might lose part of their indexation or in some cases they might see the base benefit whittled down. That creates quite a different kind of a promise for those pension plan participants because there's some risk involved; it's not an unconditional promise. Under those circumstances you could justify having a slightly higher discount rate than what you would get if you used a government bond, but the essence of the problem is to think: how valuable is this promise?
I will say—and I apologize that I'm branching off from your question—if you think of the situation that a Canadian who does not work for the federal government would face in trying to provide for herself or himself a similar kind of pension to what the federal employee gets, the right kind of asset for them to hold would be the real return bond because it's an unconditional promise and it's indexed to inflation. So the amount they would need to save is vastly higher than what they can save because they would need to match the contribution rates that you'd have to pay to fund the plan properly in that kind of an environment.
There are important ramifications from this for retirement saving more generally.