IT WAS another of those seemingly endless political debates that form background noise in Ottawa, a panel of MPs gabbing on television to fill space between the ads.
The topic was MP pay and a proposal from an independent commission that MPs, like judges, should receive a 10 percent salary increase this year.
It was easy to tune out the “debate” since it is obvious the 10 percent would not happen, given that the federal government faces a strike by tens of thousands of employees who have been offered less than three percent.
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But suddenly, Conservative Party MP Jay Hill, from Peace River, B.C., said something that brought the background to the foreground. Why not tie MP salary fluctuations to farmer income?
Eh?
Hill did not mean it literally. He was making a point.
In the last Parliament, MPs voted to give up their function of voting on their own salary increases in favour of tying MP salaries to those of judges, which are set by an independent commission.
Hill wondered why judges should be the standard. He is not a lawyer.
“In my previous life, I was a farmer,” said the former grain producer. “Why not tie it to farmers?”
Why not indeed? It would mean that MP salaries would decrease this year, since farm income tanked last year to a national negative for the first time ever.
MP salaries now are set at $141,000. Cabinet ministers are paid $208,600.
This is not a column about MP salaries, good or bad. It is, rather, a reflection on the fact that society’s elites expect to receive compensation that is totally divorced from what average people receive.
The current coffee row complaint is about million dollar hockey players who refuse to accept a salary cap while the fans can’t afford to attend games.
But it is endemic in the business world. The executives who took high tech giant Nortel into near bankruptcy earned millions of dollars while employees lost jobs and investors lost money.
The managers who led Saskatchewan Wheat Pool from prairie business icon to Toronto Stock Exchange penny stock received rich bonuses and buyouts while farmers saw their share investments disappear as their incomes plummeted.
Hill’s question is an interesting one, even if he was merely making a rhetorical point.
Perhaps the salaries of politicians, or at least their fluctuations, should be tied to the welfare of the citizens they were elected to serve rather than tied to a judicial class whose salary always goes up.
Perhaps business and union leaders should see their salaries indexed to how their investors, employees or members are doing, rather than what the market will bear.
For the record, prime minister Paul Martin saw the poor optics of 10 percent and quickly announced that MP salaries would no longer be tied to judges’ salaries and pay increases for parliamentarians would be less than 10 percent.
A final note is on the tyranny of percentages.
If government employees receive three percent, an average salary of $40,000 would receive a raise of $1,200. If MPs sacrificed by adopting the same modest raise, they would receive more than three times that in actual dollars – $4,230.