Twenty years ago, in 2006, I wrote a series of columns on the salaries of civic and provincial bureaucrats. The public had begun to notice that in certain government sectors, many bureaucrats enjoyed salaries and unassailable benefits more typical of princelings than public servants.
City managers, city deputy directors, and police chiefs were earning not only twice what their cities' mayors did, but sometimes as much as $100,000 more. There were, as there are now, numerous examples of inexplicable pay hikes and severance packages negotiated out of the public eye. One was rumoured to have been around $800,000 — eye-popping then, but nothing out of the ordinary now.
Reasons for these severance packages were, and still are, never given. Why getting your ass drop-kicked out the door deserves such munificence remains a mystery. Twenty years down the road, nothing has changed.
Wait — I'll amend that. Something has changed. Politicians, especially in the civic arena, wised up and began plundering expense accounts like teens burning through dad's Visa. They travel at public expense on 'fact-finding' missions — facts that could easily be found on Google or a phone call.
When pressed on the wages and benefits that bureaucrats and politicians enjoy — as opposed to those which all of us drudges in the private sector do not — governments trot out the usual bull excuses designed to justify their self-serving greed. Such as: 'You have to spend money to attract good people,' 'Salaries and benefits are much greater in the private sector,' and 'Modern government bodies resemble huge corporations, so managers should enjoy commensurate benefits.'
I have trouble with all such excuses. If life is so much better in the executive levels of the private sector, what's stopping public-sector executives from migrating there? Altruism? A devotion to public service? Colour me sceptical.
And to those who insist their compensation should equal that of the private sector, I'd say sure, if you were paid by shareholders who insist on profit. But they aren't. They're paid by taxpayers, whose only recourse to ridding themselves of incompetents is voting in a government that may or may not decide to show them the door — with a severance package.
As for the idea that governments have to spend money to attract good people, this is not only unproven but, in light of recent disasters committed by our civic and provincial governments, ludicrous. In reality, shelling out money for 'good people' is a self-regenerating excuse for providing largesse at taxpayers' expense, with salaries continually leap-frogging above each other from constituency to constituency. It's the gift designed to keep on giving.
The irony here? While the number of journalists covering government has shrunk due to ever-tightening editorial budgets, the number of government staffers dedicated to public relations has grown. As a taxpayer and citizen, I've given enough.
