Juno News - January 27, 2024


MPs to receive yet another pay raise (ft. Kris Sims)


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

185.2417

Word Count

2,671

Sentence Count

192


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 One thing I wanted to talk about, all of these politicians that have presided over this decline
00:00:13.540 have gotten a pay raise. Have you gotten a pay raise yet this year? I don't see a lot of hands
00:00:19.240 out there. I mean, I'm looking at a camera, but I'm imagining that if you're sitting in your
00:00:23.440 living room or driving around, you probably wouldn't have raised your hand for that
00:00:27.460 had I actually asked you to in a serious way. Well, parliamentarians play by different rules than
00:00:34.780 we do. Much as the folks we scrummed on the streets of Davos last week, it's rules for me and rules for
00:00:40.880 thee. Never the twain shall meet. Just to look at the numbers here, courtesy of the Canadian
00:00:46.520 Taxpayers Federation, MP pay increases are going up between $8,100 and over $16,000, depending on
00:00:54.720 whether you are a lowly backbench MP, then you're on the bottom end. Or if you are Justin Trudeau,
00:01:00.040 he's on the top end. This is a 4.2% pay raise starting April 1st. Well, that is, as I understand
00:01:08.700 it, larger than inflation. So we're not even just talking about keeping up with cost of living.
00:01:13.160 We're talking about actually getting more money for a job well done. I'm not exactly sure about that.
00:01:20.540 Chris Sims is sure of most things though in this world. She is the Alberta Director for the Canadian
00:01:25.520 Taxpayers Federation and back with us as on every Monday. Chris, I'm not messing up the numbers here,
00:01:31.540 right? This is more than inflation for the last year. As far as we can tell, yeah. We have to also
00:01:36.380 keep in mind how much these MPs are paid for things like housing, right? All of their bills are paid,
00:01:42.020 their travel is paid, all that stuff that you and I will have to, you know, save money for things like
00:01:48.100 your heating bills or transportation, anything like that, your rent, your mortgage. The vast
00:01:53.620 majority of that is covered courtesy of the taxpayer. And we really need to stress here,
00:01:59.560 the Prime Minister is now going to be making, as of April 1st, once these pay raises kick in,
00:02:05.580 the Prime Minister is now going to be paid more than $405,000. So just like picture what you make,
00:02:15.280 quadruple it, more than quadruple it. Imagine yourself as the taxpayer, which you probably are,
00:02:21.540 and you're working, you know, nine to five, you're working 40 hours a week, you probably work pretty
00:02:25.940 hard for what you do earn. Now picture $405,000 plus expenses. So we have to keep in mind that he
00:02:33.560 gets to stay in a mansion, which is called Rideau Cottage, but it's not a cottage right next to the
00:02:37.920 Governor General. And we pay for this massive lake house at Harrington Lake. And we pay for all of
00:02:43.920 his transportation. So again, $405,000. This is what's annoying though, is that we're not hearing
00:02:51.920 enough members of Parliament, Andrew, speaking up against these pay hikes, including from some of the
00:02:58.280 usual suspects that we would be expecting to speak up against these automatic pay increases. So we want
00:03:04.360 to see members of Parliament really walk the talk here. If they want to truly save taxpayers money,
00:03:10.360 they should do leadership things and lead by example and say, you know what, I'm going to donate
00:03:16.360 all of my pay raise to charity. And as soon as my team, we don't care if it's the blue team or the orange
00:03:22.140 team, as soon as my team is in power, I'm going to stop these MP pay increases, and perhaps even cut
00:03:28.760 Member of Parliament pay. That would be novel. And that's something we want to see coming out of Ottawa.
00:03:33.960 And one thing that I would point out here as well is that this is exactly the problem of automatic
00:03:41.000 increases. I don't think there should ever be an automatic escalator on a tax or on a pay increase,
00:03:47.600 because it lets politicians do exactly what they're doing now, which is say, oh, I didn't do it. I didn't
00:03:52.200 vote for it. I mean, they should really have to vote for this every time they want to do it, and own why they are in
00:03:57.960 fact doing it. Yeah, we need to zero in on that as well, because we'll sometimes hear politicians say,
00:04:04.040 oh, well, exactly what you said. I didn't vote for this. Yeah, we know. There's a law that automatically
00:04:09.680 increases your pay on April 1st, no fooling. And you don't need to trot yourself into the House of
00:04:16.340 Commons. You don't even need to sign up through Zoom or whatever terminology they're using there and vote
00:04:22.000 for your own pay increase. But what's really disingenuous is when they throw their hands up in the air,
00:04:27.860 metaphorically, and say, oh, what are we to do? It's automatic. They work in the legislature.
00:04:34.180 They are legislators. They create law. They could stop this tomorrow if they felt like it. So it's
00:04:43.580 not as if some sort of alien god of government is forcing Prime Minister Trudeau to take more than
00:04:50.040 $405,000 home every year and is foisting this upon him unwillingly. That is not happening.
00:04:56.980 Okay, he's the Prime Minister. They could stop this tomorrow if they felt like it. Apparently,
00:05:02.760 though, they just don't feel like it. And it's always bad when politicians are taking big pay hikes.
00:05:08.920 But especially now, as my friend Franco Terrazzano points out, people are struggling to afford
00:05:14.880 hamburger. Like I was just doing my family grocery shopping last night, and I noticed a family ahead
00:05:20.520 of me, the mom was putting away the grapes and putting away the stuff that she could, you know,
00:05:26.040 eke out and do without with her kids that week. These are the people paying for these politicians'
00:05:32.600 pay increases. So that's pretty gross. And we want to see them stopped. A lot of us, I can't speak for
00:05:40.040 you, but a lot of us in the private sector during the lockdowns and the madness that was happening over
00:05:45.440 the last four years, right in the heat of it and the teeth of it, at the worst of it, a lot of people
00:05:50.460 in the private sector took pay cuts. They probably took pay cuts for a long time. In some cases, they
00:05:56.440 even lost their jobs. And now just imagine the small business owners who were completely locked
00:06:01.700 out, frozen out, lost everything. These are the people who are paying for these politicians' pay
00:06:06.600 increases. They've not missed one.
00:06:08.720 Well, I was just going to bring up the CBA payouts. I mean, we have businesses across this country that
00:06:13.960 cannot afford to pay back the, I think it's $40,000 in a lot of cases, if people took the full
00:06:19.120 amount in CBA loans. Now, look, they took this back. They took this money. They knew they were going to
00:06:24.340 have to pay it back. But you have businesses that are saying, I literally cannot afford this. Well,
00:06:28.620 governments are finding room in their budget to pay MPs more. And I don't want to do the math here,
00:06:34.360 but you even take that lower number, $8,000 and multiply it by 338. That's massive.
00:06:40.200 Yeah. It's an enormous amount of money. And as far as the, you know, the $1.2 trillion debt goes,
00:06:46.460 it's not going to balance our books, but it leads by example. And if we saw politicians and MPs leading
00:06:55.160 by example and saying, you know what? I'm going to take a pay cut. Here's my stipend. Here's my pay
00:07:00.500 stub. I'm taking this pay cut, or I'm going to campaign on cutting everybody's pay. I'm going
00:07:05.680 to make sure that we actually put our time and our dues in too. That would go a long way. And to
00:07:10.800 your point on folks who were taking CERB, yeah, that needs to be payback, but we need to be as
00:07:18.220 compassionate and kind and patient as possible. Because in many cases, these businesses were forced
00:07:24.540 to lock down. They were forced to shut down. This is not something that they just woke up in 2020
00:07:31.000 and said, you know what? It feels like a fun idea. I'm going to completely freeze out all of my
00:07:35.580 employees. I'm going to close the restaurant that I worked for for 20 years. They didn't, no sane
00:07:40.900 person does that. So by and large, most of the folks who were taking those payments were doing so
00:07:47.520 to keep the lights on somehow, to keep even their credit rating flowing in hopes that they could one day
00:07:53.460 open up again. So yes, they do need to pay it back, but we need to be as calm and reasonable and kind
00:07:59.720 as possible. And that is not something we're seeing coming from this federal government. It really
00:08:03.880 reminds me, Andrew, remember back in the before times when the CRA was shaking down waitresses for
00:08:10.840 every single dollar tip they got? They were going after girls working at the mall, Andrew, saying,
00:08:16.520 did you get 40% off that pair of slacks? Well, that's a taxable benefit. Like, this is crazy.
00:08:22.240 These are the same people jetting off to places like you just got back from, and thank you for
00:08:26.360 covering that, you know? Well, we'll talk about that in a moment. I just, I wanted to ask you the
00:08:31.100 devil's advocate position here, because we do hear sometimes people say, listen, if you want to attract
00:08:36.060 good people in politics that aren't there for the money, there needs to be some fair compensation.
00:08:42.560 And I'm sympathetic to the argument in some way. I mean, not everyone can afford to do the Donald
00:08:47.600 Trump thing and say, I'm going to donate my salary to charity. Or I think Javier Malay in Argentina,
00:08:52.160 I think he did like a raffle for his salary, which was like, again, it sounded impressive,
00:08:56.600 like, you know, 25, you know, 2.5 million pesos, but it was like $2,000 or something. But how should
00:09:02.720 this be dealt with? Because obviously, you can't just bake in a salary in, you know, 1867
00:09:07.800 and never increases. So how should this be dealt with?
00:09:11.520 As minimally as humanly possible. So let's start even from the ground up, from local politics,
00:09:18.160 okay? Unfortunately, now you're seeing at local city halls in places like Calgary and Edmonton,
00:09:23.980 the mayors being paid more than the premiers. You are seeing councillors whose life goal it is to
00:09:29.820 park their butts at city council for the next 10, 15, 20 years and make a career of it. That was never
00:09:36.280 the role of local government. Local government was always staffed by people who were former teachers,
00:09:43.800 retired police officers, current shop owners, people who were either directly currently invested
00:09:50.060 in what was going on in their neighborhoods, like a shopkeeper, or had already worked most of their lives
00:09:56.220 and now had time to give back. That is the entire reason why we call it public service, okay?
00:10:03.320 They should be paid a stipend for showing up to those meetings and doing the homework and writing
00:10:08.240 the reports. That should not be a career goal of a four-year undergrad in poli sci and city planning
00:10:14.860 degree person. That is not what that is supposed to be for. That's where the rot starts, okay? It's
00:10:20.320 that level of entitlement and permanent government that leads to this sort of nonsense. Then you jump
00:10:24.960 up provincial. It's slightly better, slightly worse than city politics, by and large. Now you're at the
00:10:30.100 federal level. I would turn the question around and say, are you getting good value for money?
00:10:37.420 So when you think of all the different services you have from private corporations, whatever it is,
00:10:43.360 internet service, food production, delivery time, all that stuff, you know, airplane tickets,
00:10:49.540 think of all of the services that you actually use and get over a calendar year. Ask yourself if
00:10:55.900 you're getting good value for the money that you pay. Be as honest as you can. Now ask yourself if
00:11:01.640 you're getting awesome value for money from your federal politicians. I'm venturing a guess that the
00:11:08.120 answer is usually no. So the whole argument of, well, we need to attract good people, are we?
00:11:13.360 All right. I have one weird idea I want to run by you. Okay. Part of it I don't like, but I think
00:11:20.400 there's something to it if we massage it a little bit. For every dollar you cut in spending, you get
00:11:27.220 10% that goes to the House of Commons as salaries. I'm going to have to think about that, but I like it.
00:11:35.100 Yeah. Your base salary is like, you know, $100 a week or something. But for every dollar you save that
00:11:42.140 year, you know, 10 cents of it goes into a pool that pays MPs, but you only get it if you voted
00:11:48.120 in favor of the spending cut. That's so smart. Otherwise, like everyone cuts spending and then
00:11:53.020 the NDP gets to like benefit from the spending cut commission. I don't know. There's something to
00:11:57.660 that. I've got to figure out the fine tune details. Have you bought the domain name yet or no?
00:12:01.960 I don't know. What's the domain name? Cuts for paychecks? Cuts for? Yeah. What is it?
00:12:09.160 Cuts for cookies? When do you get your cookie? When you made your cut? Something like that.
00:12:14.440 Yeah. Oh man. I'm trying. Yeah. I'm trying to think of, uh, all right. We'll try to come up
00:12:18.200 with a snappy name and we'll put the domain. By the way, I would never normally tell a lady to
00:12:23.740 this robe, but I have to point out that the way your jacket is, it was saying fund CBC the entire
00:12:28.900 interview. Oh no! Let's not do that. No. Although we did it. One of my colleagues did email and say he
00:12:35.400 wanted, uh, wanted that shirt. So, uh, Oh, nice. Well, we don't make money off of them. They're
00:12:39.840 at cost. I think they're only 20 bucks. Just go to our website. Like everything is included. We
00:12:44.180 don't, we don't make money off of it. We just want to spread the good word that we should defund
00:12:48.980 the CBC, not fund. You actually had a, I haven't read it yet, but you flagged a CBC story for my
00:12:54.660 producer. What's going on there? Very quickly. And we can touch on this again next week. Uh, while you
00:12:59.060 guys were out holding truth to power and speaking truth to power, thank you very much in Davos for
00:13:03.680 doing that. Cause that's where a lot of bad ideas come from folks. We need to cut them off there.
00:13:07.500 So thank you for doing that. Um, black locks reporter uncovered the fact that, uh, you know,
00:13:13.580 how the CBC talks about how vitally important they are for indigenous programming. Well, apparently 0.3%.
00:13:21.800 So 0.3% of their money goes towards indigenous programming. And black locks found that they cut
00:13:30.900 that budget, the indigenous programming budget by about $25,000 last year. So the next time that
00:13:37.680 the big wigs at CBC try to say, Oh, we're essential. No, you're not. And in fact, you cut that funding.
00:13:45.540 Nice. Well, I think that is definitely something we should look into. Yeah. CBC always loves to do
00:13:50.920 the glitzy, glamorous stuff and not the things that are actually in their mandate. Uh, we will,
00:13:57.100 uh, let you go there. Chris, I got it. Chops for checks. Nice. Yeah. Chops for checks. That's the
00:14:03.900 initiative. It's like better than voter recall. Uh, you have to make chops to get your check. And if
00:14:08.140 you do it, then we, we can talk, but, uh, uh, Chris Sims, Alberta director for the Canadian
00:14:12.680 taxpayers federation, always a pleasure. And we will talk to you next Monday. You bet.
00:14:16.880 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton show support the program by donating to true
00:14:21.420 north at www.tnc.news.