By Jim Hagarty
2006
There has been a lot of griping these past few weeks about the 25 per cent raise (and increase in benefits, pension, etc.) that our members of the Ontario legislature voted themselves as an early Christmas present. I use the word “griping” because I simply don’t think it’s fair to hold a little pay hike against these hard-working folks who only want to keep up with their hard-working cousins – the MPs in Ottawa. I can’t remember who exactly it was that the MPs were only trying to keep up with when they voted themselves a tidy raise a couple of years ago but who cares? Well deserved, I say. Every penny (and $144,000) of it.
Objectors have said, as critics will always say, that these people knew what the pay levels were going into the job and shouldn’t have started complaining about them after they’d won a seat in the Legislature but to that, I say, “Pshaw!” and I do not throw around pshaws willy nilly. I think it’s just fortunate that we have elected people who had the intelligence to see that they were grossly underpaid and the fortitude to make things right.
With the municipal elections out of the way, and everyone settled into a nice, four-year mandate from the people, my prediction is there will be a raid on the cookie jar early into this new term. Phone me up and scold me heartily if Stratford’s new councillors don’t realize sometime within the next 12 months that they’re working way too hard for too little pay and set about to do something to rectify the injustice.
I say, “Go for it!” No, you won’t find me complaining about any of it. And I think those who are whining are looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope. The reason these raises annoy anyone at all is that they stick out like a sore thumb. They are way too obvious. What is needed is some sort of diversion that would keep politicians’ raises on the back pages of the papers, if they made the news at all.
I propose the following and I think it should go a long way towards quelling this and all future similar uproars. People complain that the reason this comes about every so often is because politicians have the ability to vote themselves pay hikes where the rest of us don’t. We are not likely to wrest the power to line their own pockets away from our governors so why waste time going down that road? Instead, a more profitable direction to head in would be, it seems to me, in giving all the rest of us the ability to determine our own compensation levels. According to our occupations, we could compare ourselves to some other group that is earning more than we are and take a vote in the office to raise our salaries accordingly. We’ll call it leap-frog pay hiking and make a game of it.
In the case of the newspaper I work for, we will simply phone around, find out what all the other journalists in Canada are making, draw up a big grid and chart showing us at number 72 out of 100 and vote ourselves a 35 per cent pay hike to bring us into line with the upper scales, where we belong. We will then forward the news on to our employer that as of such and such a date, our salaries will be increasing. Then, we will wait for the raises to kick in.
Sector by sector, job by job. This could be the way of the future.
And for those on social assistance who seem most distressed at having been thrown a three per cent bone while the throwers gave themselves 25 per cent, hang on. This system will work for you too. Just get together, vote yourself whatever it is you need, send a note to the government and voila! Problem solved. The only shame is that this idea didn’t occur to me sooner. It would have spared us all so much heartache.
In fact, I believe I will take the initiative and vote myself a bonus for dreaming up such a wildly promising plan.
