Salaries are going up for the members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) in the occupied Canadian province of “British Columbia.” CBC News reported that a three-member “independent panel appointed by the premier” has recommended pay hikes that would increase the salary of MLAs 29 percent and that of the premier Gordon Campbell a hefty 53 percent.
The governing BC Liberal Party caucus has approved the salary increases. The increase would amount to $22,000 a year for MLAs, bringing them up to $98,000. For the premier Gordon Campbell, the pay hike would be $65,000, swelling his salary to $186,200 a year.
The “independent panel” also recommended the resumption of a generous pension plan for MLAs, which they would be eligible to receive after six years in government (less than two terms).
Campbell said, “We have to ensure that compensation for MLAs and their families is fair.”
The leader of the official opposition New Democratic Party (NDP), Carole James, rejected this. Said James, “People felt that it wasn’t something reasonable. It wasn’t something that the public would expect. It didn’t pass the test of fairness on behalf of the public.”
Eighteen months ago, on the heels of a public outcry, the NDP also rejected a proposed 15 percent salary increase for BC MLAs. The NDP’s rejectionism must be considered skeptically based on its past history of accepting and bestowing generous salary increases on MLAs.
Campbell will put to the test NDP politicians’ unwillingness to take home more money. He said there would be a free vote on the proposed increases and that any individual MLA can nix the salary hike — for good.
Needless to say, politicians feeding at the public trough has met with public disapproval.
Campbell dismissed the negativity: “Taxpayers are never happy, I don’t think, when salaries are dealt with, but it’s something that we have to do if we are to attract good people to public life and not punish people for, you know, becoming a part of public life.”
Imagine that! A salary of $76,000 is punishment for “good people.” What Campbell is, in fact, saying is that “good people” are attracted by money. By Campbell’s reckoning, he must, therefore, be approximately twice as good a person as other MLAs, given that his salary is almost double the MLAs’ salary. By logical extension, those BCers earning less than MLA salaries must be less good. This would be a sizeable chunk of the BC populace since the yearly per capita GDP salary is $41,424 (2006 BC Stats). Apparently, those people who would comprise the political class must be a special pedigree of human being.
Moreover, according to Campbell, “[T]he sacrifices [politicians] make and their families make is often not recognized.”
How, then, does Campbell view the sacrifices of the average worker? It seems that their sacrifices were over-estimated and over-paid. Therefore, his government undertook to remediate this mistake by reducing the minimum wage by $2 per hour, throwing out collective bargaining agreements, retroactively rolling back wages, and threatening to jail union leaders who would strike against the anti-worker government edicts.
The tacit policy of the BC Liberal Party: those BCers who are “good people” can eat cake at the government coffers. The rest will just have to work more on improving their goodness.