What’s a politician worth?
If you’ll stop laughing for a moment, let’s reframe the question. We’ve veered into an unhealthy debate on this subject of value for money.
More precisely: How much should a politician be paid – that is, how much ought to be in keeping with the scope of the job, the size of the community being served, and the scale of comparable roles in the private sector?
Can we ever solve the proverbial chicken-and-egg, what-comes-first dilemma involving capabilities and compensation with politicians and pay packages – specifically, do we offer great salaries to attract good people or do we get good people to then reward great salaries?
Can we really attract great skill to public life and its responsibilities without bestowing significant sums, and how might thrifty compensation repel the best and brightest from serving?
And to add a wrinkle to this, because this appears to be the topic du jour, yet another question: when our elected officials are appointed to additional public agencies, should they be entitled to double-, triple-, even quadruple- and quintuple-dip?
We are in a curious blend of displeasure: inadequate oversight of setting compensation, insufficient transparency about it, and infuriating periods between elections as the sole source of instilling accountability.
At the moment we are gnawing on the most recent Statement of Financial Information (SOFI) for Metro Vancouver. It contained – if you dredged hard – the compensation minutiae of our mayors and councillors atop what they were earning in their supposedly full-time roles back in their communities.
SOFIs in various jurisdictions turn into annual rituals that send journalists out to conduct “streeters” with the predictably antagonized public. They bring out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation for its ceremonial accusation of waste and questioning of sanity. They elicit unctuous politicians who cannot fathom why we would dare challenge their comp. And they find an occasional outlier who agrees the roles do not befit the rewards. The Global News/Corus newsrooms are making a meal of the Metro Van one lately.
And on the face of it, some of the dough appears outsized, considering the small-city officials: Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley pulled in $393,075, Delta Mayor George Harvie took in $346,780, Port Coquitlam’s Brad West received $342,512; and Richmond’s Malcolm Brodie brought in $331,959. As others point out, this is more than the premier or his cabinet, and fuels frustration and a perceived gap between earnings and outcomes.
Some leaders forego income to take positions (former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney might soon), while others have never earned more than what they earn as politicians (Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, career pol), and still others would never earn more than what they are making in office (let’s not name names).
What we can say is that many excellent people are not running for office, and many in office are excellent at securing side hustles in adjacent public entities that less directly serve those who elected them.
It’s unclear what can be done about the first issue, because it’s not all about the money. The public scrutiny has gone overboard now into a toxic climate. When someone on a ski slope feels entitled to tell the holidaying Justin Trudeau to get out of B.C. (in far less polite language) or disrupt Chrystia Freeland as she makes her opening argument to succeed Trudeau, we’ve fallen off our rockers. We owe politics a viable and respected path for those with the skills and dedication to lead.
But, agreed, when our civic officials earn extensive extra salaries and per diems, often more than their main roles, they’ve lost the plot, too. And there is a rather simple fix.
Over the years, my bosses permitted me to freelance (I’m doing that now), under the condition it didn’t interfere with the main job I’d been hired to perform. I put in extra hours when the part-time infiltrated the full-time so I didn’t shortchange the larger employer.
A challenge with elected officials is that the bargain they strike with the public is to be constantly accessible when not on vacation – sometimes even when they are. Maybe unfair, always been so.
But today’s Metro Vancouver cohort takes time more directly from the bigger employer to occupy the extra ones. They owe their time and energy to the people who elected them, and if the extra work is truly designed to serve their constituents, why not deduct the portion of time they spend away from home base from the compensation they get back there? Treat Metro Vancouver, TransLink and other agencies as part of the job and consolidate compensation, but only after an independent review of salaries.
While we’re at it, instill some real-world metrics on budget management, infrastructure delivery or even housing starts as performance incentives. And please, make it all transparent instead of a treasure hunt in the documents.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
