Why Ontario's politicians are perennially underpaid
Do we really want to turn ordinary elected politicians into proverbial paupers, suppressing their wages for years?

thestar.com
By MARTIN REGG COHN
June 7, 2017

The minimum wage is rising and teachers are getting raises. Even senior civil servants are finally unfrozen.

Not your lowly, low-paid, local MPP.

Pity our poor provincial parliamentarians. While everyone else is cashing in, politicians at Queen’s Park are still frozen out. Have been since 2003, off and on. They were zapped until 2005, then again in 2009, and will be until 2019.

That’s more than a decade in the deep freeze.

Don’t cry for me, MPPs insist. Politicians don’t ask for pity in public, because wearing a hair shirt is part of their job description.

But there is no glory in penury - not when the public is oblivious to your perennial martyrdom.

Any idea what MPPs earn? Try this quiz at home to see if you can guess their annual take-home pay:

A. $172,700;

B. $147,700;

C. $125,000 (including a $25,000 tax-free allowance);

D. None of the above.

If you picked A ($172,700), you’re mixing them up with MPs in Ottawa.

If you answered B ($147,400), you’re confusing Ontario’s elected MPPs with unelected Senators in Ottawa, whose pay is set at $25,000 below what MPs earn in the House of Commons.

If you chose C, you’re living in the past. Those notorious tax-free allowances were phased out decades ago, and you’re still aiming too high.

The correct answer is D, because base pay is well below all of the above. Ordinary MPPs earn $116,550 a year - have been since 2009.

That’s not nothing. Not in a country where the average industrial wage is less than half as much.

(Cabinet ministers earn $165,850, Premier Kathleen Wynne gets $209,000, PC leader Patrick Brown takes home $181,000, and the NDP’s Andrea Horwath gets $158,000.)

Do we really want to turn ordinary elected politicians into proverbial paupers, suppressing their wages for a decade at a time while others pass them by - like many of the 123,000 public servants on the so-called Sunshine List earning in excess of $100,000 a year? Perhaps people want their supposedly unprincipled politicians to earn less than school principals, or delight in the idea of police officers on overtime overtaking their MPPs.

Given that Ontario’s economic performance has exceeded that of most other industrialized economies over the past three years, why are we still making our MPPs live in the past?

A 2003 salary freeze under Dalton McGuinty was followed by another in 2009, when the Liberal premier used it as cover to demand wage restraint from public sector workers. His one-year freeze was extended in 2010, and again in 2012 for another two years, as the Liberals brought in austerity budgets.

Premier Kathleen Wynne went further in 2014 by tying the freeze to a balanced budget - which she delivered this spring. But there was a catch - a two-year waiting period after elimination of the deficit - meaning no catch-up until 2019.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it seems like a long time to make provincial politicians pay the price for public opprobrium by earning a lower real salary, annually, after inflation erosion.

What about those lavish pensions they get as a reward for retirement or a consolation for defeat? They were phased out two decades ago by the Mike Harris Tories, replaced by a garden variety “defined contribution” scheme and modest severance payments.

In Ottawa, MPs go easier on themselves. Under former PM Stephen Harper, Parliament froze salaries in 2010 at the height of the economic crisis, but only for three years. Since then the base salary has gone up from $157,730 to $172,700 today.

(The House of Commons links annual increases to an index of wage settlements across the country. Ontario MPP salaries have been set, since 2006, at 75 per cent of what MPs get.)

The problem with provincial pay freezes is not just that our politicians are shortchanged year after year, but that they are punished yet again when the thaw eventually comes: Under the current formula, their pay packet will automatically increase by roughly $13,000 in 2019, a catch-up of more than 11 per cent.

That pent-up pressure for a wage increase will be matched by public pressure to make further sacrifices. And provide more fodder for the media to mock their supposed avarice, deterring more qualified candidates from seeking elected office.

Don’t cry for MPPs, Ontario. But don’t burn them at the stake for ending a deep-freeze of their making.