They get away with it every few years and they should not.
We must stop politicians from violating the contracts they agree to when they take their jobs.
Specifically, the concern here is the tendency of our MLAs and city councillors to grant themselves raises. This issue reared its ugly head again when City of Calgary aldermen voted themselves a whopping 11.7-per-cent pay hike last week. This is on top of the three-per-cent raise they gave themselves last year and the inflationary raise they are due next year.
In August of 2001, the Klein government handed MLAs a 10-per-cent after-inflation pay increase and sweetened their severance pay. (Let’s not even talk about the fat feds on that score!)
The City of Edmonton has been relatively quiet on this front. The last time Edmonton city councillors gave themselves a raise was back in 2000. Their pay increases have since been linked to the Alberta weekly wage index as compiled by Statistics Canada – which has been pathetically low lately (0.82 per cent in the January 2002-January 2003 period).
While the Edmonton council raise is several years old now, all three situations reflect an inherent conflict of interest: politicians are setting new and better terms for their own compensation when they had agreed to less.
And this hurts. In all three cases the office holders effectively signed on to a deal and proceeded to break it. This is loathsome. Without fail, such raises, when justified, should kick in after elections.
When we sign a contract in business, we stick to it as long as the opposite party meets their side of the bargain. If one party does not like the terms, they renegotiate at renewal time.
Why should politicians be exempt from this natural process? They have, in essence, signed a three- to five-year contract with their constituents to work for a certain amount of money. It’s one of the most iron-clad contracts around.
Of the jobs I know, it certainly provides one of the longest-term contracts. If the service is inadequate, the customer (electorate) cannot ask for a refund. The benefits include some sweet retirement perks, a tremendous amount of certainty – since there is little chance that the customers will fail to pay their bills – and the job comes with a public profile that few other jobs afford.
Excluding the pay per se, comparisons to any free- market employment situation make the political contract look exceptionally cushy.
That’s not to imply that politicians are overpaid, by any means. It’s the terms of their contract, apart from compensation, that are favourable.
Sometimes I don’t envy the heavy demands we put on our leaders. It can be a thankless job, with the grumpiest, most demanding customers around. Important decisions have to be made sometimes with the skimpiest information.
But these factors do not allow politicians to violate the terms of the deal they signed. Such a move even degrades the honour and dignity of the office. When trust goes, what is left, after all?
For me, the single biggest factor that relegated the self-righteous Canadian Alliance to the backbenches of my mind was when they accepted the fat federal pension. They spurned this same pension before being elected. Deborah Grey was the most prominent offender in this regard.
But I hold the lower levels of government culpable too. And they seem to know it. Politician defensiveness is palpable on this issue. The Klein government rushed pay hikes through quickly and quietly shortly after the 2001 election. The haste did not stop the teachers from noticing, and they rightfully fought hard for similarly generous terms last year.
There is great injustice going on here. While the average wage earner is seeing modest (if any) increases in real wages, politicians (excluding City of Edmonton councillors), teachers, and health-care workers are getting double-digit increases. I completely blame the example being set from the top.
In an interview last week, Calgary Ald. Craig Burrows defended the recent aldermanic hike as a “re-classification” from part-time to full time, versus a “raise.”
We’ll see if the Calgary unions buy that bunk when their contracts expire. I doubt they will be any more gullible than the teachers were provincially. Just watch the tax burden in Calgary grow significantly.
Not all politicians are guilty. There were some sensible Calgary aldermen who fought to defer the “reclassifications” until after the next election. These included Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart and Ald. Ric McIver, who brought exactly that motion forward and seconded it, respectively. But they had minority support. It’s a credit to both Edmonton and Calgary councils that their raises were based on independent input. But this didn’t happen provincially. The Progressive Conservative caucus granted themselves raises sans a task force or public consultation.
Let me be clear: politicians need to get raises. Especially as the complexity of holding office grows. But there is a balance that needs to be found between too little pay to attract good candidates – as was the case two or three decades ago when city councils contained numerous retired people who seemed to find meetings an inconvenience – with the opposite extreme that we are starting to see federally and, to a lesser extent provincially.
In these cases, the pay is getting so generous we may be attracting people to the political sphere who are seeking to enrich themselves instead of serving the public.
Ultimately, when an independent task force concludes that politicians’ pay is too low, it is a double-edged sword for the incumbents. Such a conclusion implies that the current crop of candidates would be of a higher calibre if their positions paid better. Taken to its logical conclusion, when they accept such recommendations they are admitting their own inadequacies. The electorate should take the hint.
And that goes double for the provincial government. If they did not even have the decency to find an independent body to support their raises, we should turf the whole lot of them. The dignity of the office depends on it.
