Spouse’s Defined Benefit Pension 40% Lower Than Expected.

Hi first time poster here. Looking for some advice for my spouse, who is based in BC, Canada. She works for an established company within the financial industry and had a defined benefit pension set up when she started. While she worked there, every paystub shows an “employee contribution” and an “employer contribution” to the pension and in her company policies she showed me the breakdown (employee was ~3% and employer contribution was equal to ~10% of her salary each pay period). She contributed to this for several years and has now left the company for a new job.

She didn’t work there long enough for it to vest. She received a pension termination letter giving her options of what to do with the money but the amount she could transfer to a locked in RSP was about 40% less than the contributions made over the time she worked there (without even accounting for any market appreciation the pension fund had over the years).

When she called the pension fund to understand how this could be, they told her that the employer contributions aren’t attributed to her at all and so the payout is only based on her contributions and the subsequent appreciation. And the employer contributions are made by the company to generally support the current retirees within the plan.

In my mind, either the pension is in the wrong for withholding a significant amount of her pension or her company was wrong for telling her that employer contributions based on her salary were in any way tied to her “total compensation”. If the pension is telling the truth, then I don’t get why the employer contributions were included on her paystubs…

Looking for advice on what I should recommend her to do here.. should she see an independent actuary to assess the pension calculation or get a lawyer (or both - or none of these options?). TIA