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

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' 1.00

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 0.86

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. 1.00

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 0.99

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.

Juno News - January 27, 2024

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

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript