Brad: I was in the same situation as you but with OPTrust. Both my wife and I put in for and received  TEI back in May which took us to the November month end deadline for retirement  to keep certain pension benefits. 
You say you will have benefits for life after 10 years.  Be aware and have a look at how the provincial government is downloading the cost of these benefits to the employee.  Also, you may want to sit in on one of the pension board's "road shows" just to feel things out.  There will be a lot of people in similar situation .  They are more to the point in answering questions compared to the government HR. 
As an aside, it would be interesting to see how many retirements took place because of the Nov. 30th date.