The Critical Compass Podcast - January 19, 2025


Politician Salaries in Canada - Too Much or Too Little？ ｜ A Critical Compass Clip

Trudeau Resignation Debrief Livestream feat. Eva Chipiuk, Martyupnorth, Sheldon Yakiwchuk Edmonton City Council's ＂Show & Tell＂ Public Engagement w⧸Jason Bale

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

175.49

Word count

1,042

Sentence count

1

People

Also mentioned:
Mark Gerritsen

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the current pay disparity between politicians in Canada and the rest of the world, and what we would like to see in the future. We also discuss the benefits of a scaled-up pay scale.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 i remember having shane getson on a town hall uh at one point and we talked about you know what
00:00:08.540 what mlas get paid and you know when you talk to canadians they say well they get paid too much 1.00
00:00:13.940 money obviously i mean there's a the big conversation in calgary right now is how much
00:00:18.900 raise uh city council is going to get to be you know as bad as bad as they are you know with gondek
00:00:24.300 coming up to like two and a quarter 225 000 or something it's over 200 000 um but in actuality
00:00:32.920 that's that's not a lot of money uh you know for a mayor 200 000 for city councillors 120 000
00:00:40.140 dollars uh for mlas i'm not sure what they get paid mps are like two and a quarter to 250
00:00:45.420 and and and getson said you know the reason that we have the politicians that we have
00:00:52.460 is because we're not attracting people by the with an actual reasonable amount of money for
00:00:59.420 skilled people to be in what it is is for literally like what we see these people chasing a higher
00:01:07.460 paycheck than they would achieve in their in their otherwise business lives through like so
00:01:12.880 yeah the mayor of edmonton and calgary they make more money than mlas in alberta
00:01:18.740 well yeah yeah and maybe like yeah i i can't remember exactly how much with uh the premier but
00:01:29.040 it's not that different so i don't think that mayors are in a position really are doing that
00:01:37.000 kind of responsibility that they need that kind of money well i can see two different arguments
00:01:42.240 uh sorry sheldon i can see like maybe maybe you pay them maybe you pay them so much more
00:01:47.980 that they don't then go seeking you know what whatever their next ride is going to be as soon
00:01:54.320 as they're out of politics by you know allowing uh you know lobbyists to buy them with favors and
00:01:59.460 stuff right or you pay uh an mp the the average salary of the worker of their
00:02:08.120 right of their riding yeah yeah so so there's there's your incentive to you know enrich the
00:02:15.180 people you represent because you're getting paid whatever the median salary is that that you of
00:02:19.800 the people you represent so you're looking to elevate them well i mean that's that's essentially
00:02:26.360 what what we would like to see i mean you know they say a rising tide lifts all boats yeah you're
00:02:31.500 in the leadership and you're the person that helps uh the tide rise then it gives you a stake it gives you put
00:02:38.120 you got skin in the game at that point right you're not just you're not just working on behalf of
00:02:42.160 whatever committee you're representing on behalf of whatever global interest they're representing
00:02:46.660 i what what i i mean it's a it's a probably a completely unpractical model but to me
00:02:54.160 you know the comparison is not the same as say the the free market because in the free market you
00:03:00.200 are paid to perform and so mps as far as i'm concerned are not paid don't perform if they want to
00:03:07.380 so what i would suggest is a scaled pay you get you you you get elected you get 120 000 a year
00:03:14.920 there is a scale right now but it's you know you you become a minister get paid and if you perform
00:03:21.780 well turn to your constituents and then the constituents can say yeah he deserves a raise and
00:03:27.340 so and and make make the raises big so you get paid in your first year you get a hundred thousand
00:03:32.560 dollars a year you do really well and you get a high approval rating from your constituents next 0.76
00:03:37.620 year you're going to get 150 do extremely well next year you're going to get 200 keep sucking 0.91
00:03:42.760 at what you do you're stuck at your base pay of a hundred so that's what i'd like to see something
00:03:47.200 like that because i i i mean uh beyond that i i don't think politics will ever attract like that's
00:03:55.900 another myth right that paying well attracts good people even in industry like it doesn't work
00:04:01.240 work that way like then you attract people who are just interested in making more bucks so
00:04:06.180 motivated individuals don't work for pure money they they they work for something else but
00:04:13.400 yeah it's yeah it's a challenging that's a good point that's a good point because there's there's the 0.98
00:04:18.180 whole other uh um uh incentive jennifer o'connell makes 200 000 a year as an mp like holy shit like 1.00
00:04:26.540 mark garretson makes 200 000 a year as an mp yeah yeah because there are there are the people there
00:04:34.000 that are just in it for the for the for the rush of having power over somebody yeah yeah i just i just
00:04:40.080 wasn't sure if that's how much they make because i i do think oh um there are some that make a lot more
00:04:46.440 than others like that's that's the thing i there's massive discrepancies which also don't make sense
00:04:52.180 to me but the the pay is the same for every mp so an mp right now it's approximately 220 000
00:04:58.040 and then there's uh there's a premium for being on committees there's a premium for being in the chair
00:05:04.420 of the committee there's a premium for being the speaker of the house those are good paying jobs
00:05:09.920 obviously because mlas do not make that much money oh no and mla in alberta is 120 000 a year
00:05:16.440 yeah massive yeah yeah no it's it's not even and an mla in alberta doesn't get a pension they
00:05:21.920 yeah uh mlas in alberta voted away the pension years ago and all they get is a defined contribution
00:05:28.360 to uh to a savings plan it's still generous but they don't get a pension yeah so it's like like jam
00:05:34.060 of the month club yeah so then you can see yeah federally it certainly is a nice like uh compensation
00:05:41.920 for mostly anyone but like for some skilled people um like shane getson was saying it it is a pay cut
00:05:49.260 for some people