Category: Money
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – yet more feedback
Previous installments here, here, and here. A longish dissent from reader Jay Wilson:
The way you make it sound, we, the public, are the ones who indirectly caused this problem by forcing our poor beleaguered elected representatives underground and into making the kinds of reckless spending judgements they made. I take issue with that.
As you said in your blog, “Upon taking office, most MLAs set aside established careers in exchange for a job with far less security than comparable positions in the private or public sector.” That once was the case, for a good reason. Once upon a time, MLAs made very little money as elected representatives. To offset their costs of travel, constituency responsibilities, etc, they were given expense money. Fine.
Then more people from different walks of life started getting involved in politics who didn’t necessarily make as much as the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers and businesspeople who had mostly made up the elected ranks. Not to mention the complaints from the very sorts of individuals you referenced: People from higher-paying occupations who said it wasn’t enough to live on and they could make more in the private sector.
Over time, a new sensibility developed along the lines of “Let’s pay them a better salary so that they can afford to live while serving our best interests.” In the interests of fairness, the thought occurred to some that the money spent on expense accounts and the like could be decreased as now these elected officials would actually be making more. That’s not what happened.
In fact, as salaries continued to increase, so did money for expenses and then it diversified into a whole host of different expense categories. MLAs were getting money for everything and the kitchen sink, and who made these changes? Who increased their salaries and expense money? Who made the rules so deliberately ambiguous and full of holes so wide you could drive a tank through them? They did, behind closed doors and in quick legislative motions, with cursory mentions in the local press for the most part.
Please don’t try to excuse MLAs for their sorry behaviour. This is about three things: A pronounced sense of entitlement, a disconnect from reality and pure abject greed. Maybe it isn’t on the same scale as the scandals in Britain and even Newfoundland, but those three things are present in each situation and they are things we should all be vigilant against.
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – more feedback
Previous installments here and here. Paul Pross, emeritus professor of public administration at Dalhousie and the author of several books on lobbying, NGOs, and the formation of public policy, thinks we are being too hard on our politicians:
I first met a politician fifty years ago. Since then, as a political scientist teaching at Dalhousie and, since retirement, as an active party member, I have met many more. A few turned out to be crooks. There were some self-important, pompous twits. But the majority were decent men and women who worked hard at a challenging and often stressful job.
They don’t deserve the abuse being heaped on them.
We should ask why MLA’s spend their allowances in the way they do.
For example, most MLAs seem to have bought cameras. Why? This is an electronic age and photographs are an important part of making the work of the MLA visible to voters. MLAs need photographs of meetings with constituents and the events they attend to put in newsletters, press releases and to use as videos on websites. Leaders and some other MLAs need professional quality equipment because, as Stefan Dion discovered, leaders can’t afford to look amateurish. Professional equipment can be expensive.
MLAs’ charitable donations have also been criticized. MLAs are approached by numerous charities and worthy causes. It’s hard for them to refuse, or even to give a small donation for major local projects such as a recreation centre or purchase of hospital equipment. So many politicians donate far more every year than most of us.
We clearly need updated and more explicit rules governing politicians’ expense accounts. But we should ensure that they adequately support legitimate political expenses. In fact, we have less need for highly detailed regulations than for rules that encourage respect for public money and discourage a culture of entitlement.
The media could help to achieve that if effort were put into showing the public exactly what politicians do when they are not sitting in the Legislature and why they spend what they do.
Ceremony
I hesitate to start this, for fear of luring Olympic-worshiping bores out of their rec-rooms, but US bloggers had a field day with the perfectly hideous opening ceremony in Vancouver. My favorite was Heather Havrilesky in Salon.com, Moneyquotes:
Some dramatic photography paired with soaring music and a lot of melodramatic prose. “Here, where a swerving coastline submits to waves of glacial peaks, where the mapping of the Western world came to an end, the discovery yet begins anew!” Praise Jesus! Who writes this stuff?
Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams perform the lamest song since that thing they play at the end of the NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment”: “This is your moment, your time to run like the wind!” I’m flashing back to Up With People. First Nations dancers are jumping up and down like the fraudience at a Miley Cyrus concert.
Now here comes a tribute to “the frigid North.” It’s snowing. Donald Sutherland is murmuring into a microphone somewhere. People in white are walking through the snow….
“The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass speaks to me, and my heart soars,” says Donald Sutherland….
Now here’s a tap dancer on the platform, and more maple leaves. Now there are swarms of tap dancers. Tap dancing doesn’t exactly read in a stadium. Oh, we’ll fix it by adding sparklers to our heels.
Wow, this is quite seriously not good. Now more maple leaves are falling from the ceiling. There are quite a few identifiably uncoordinated people in the mix out there. Oh God. When will it end?
Naturally, Canadian readers fired back, including this beaut from someone who styled herself, Sweet Jane.
We put the proudest, butchiest lesbian ever on an international stage to sing the living shit out of a song widely considered to be among the best ever written. Ever. We’re understandably proud of that. You don’t think it was appropriate. Go read the words – conveniently googleable! (Also, that lesbian? Totally allowed to get married here in our hopelessly-decade-behind-the-times little backwater. When, oh, when will we ever catch up to rest of the world?)
Now the good news, for those who imagine such things to be important, Nate Silver’s wonderful poly-sci statistics blog, Fivethirtyeight.com, projects that Canada — Canada! — will win the most medals at these games.
Don’t worry. We’ve sent Nate’s slide rule out to get it checked.
Hat tip: Fritz McEvoy (but don’t blame him for the snarky stuff).
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – feedback
Contrarian reader Kirby McVicar responds to our post on MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery:
The question that springs to my mind is: “Who are you and what have you done with Parker Donham?”
Resigned MLA Richard Hurlburt
What I hear you say is, ”Well, MLA’s only stole a little bit, and it’s the media’s and the public’s fault for not providing adequate salary.” Are you serious?
What does this line of thinking say to all the honest MLA’s who did not steal from the public purse: “You missed out on an opportunity we, the public and the media, set up for you. How stupid of you!”
I agree that politicians need an independent body to set remuneration policy that is binding, but this issue should not be confused with theft from the public purse.
Where is the CBC Parker, from the “Harry and Parker Show” who would have spent 15 minutes railing against such a rationale? Has the election of an NDP government outed you?
I was out of the country, but wasn’t it a Tory MLA who resigned? After the jump, more reader reaction.
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery
A friend asked recently why I had not written about the MLA expenses flap, and I confessed that I have trouble summoning much outrage over the issue. While I admire Brian Flinn’s dogged pursuit of the facts in AllNovaScotia.com, I fear that the public and the media are almost as much to blame for the problem as our lawmakers.
The public nurses an attitude of begrudgery toward politicians, and the media fans these embers at every opportunity. This is not our most attractive quality, and it makes it almost impossible for MLAs — who by definition must set their own salaries — to pay themselves appropriately for the work they do. So MLAs have, unwisely but understandably, developed a variety of secretive ways to pad their allowances.
A few observations seem in order:
- On the facts adduced so far, an audit of the compensation received by 60-odd present and former MLAs turned up a small handful of obvious abuses, amounting to a few thousand dollars each, and a larger number of errors in accounting or judgment, amounting to less than a few hundred dollars each. Total recovery: far less than the cost of the audit.
- Compared to recent expense scandals in Britain and Newfoundland, this is thin gruel. No Nova Scotia MLA built a swimming pool at public expense.
- The media’s habit of lumping salary and expense reimbursement together is invidious. We expect MLAs to have constituency offices, and these require rent, salaries, furniture, postage, phones, electricity, computers, and sundry office equipment. We expect MLAs to travel frequently between their ridings and the capital, and this imposes real costs. To add these legitimate expenses to their base salary, and cite the total as “compensation,” is absurd.
- While it is reasonable to expect MLAs to support large expenses with receipts, I am not sure I want lawmakers spending their time adding up slips from Tim Horton’s.
- Many costs imposed on MLAs are not receiptable. You and I can brush past the minor hockey player in the supermarket checkout line, but an MLA cannot. They are hit up constantly for donations, gifts, handouts.
- The circumstances of individual MLAs — remoteness from Halifax, size of riding, local culture of constituent service, committee duties — are almost infinitely varied. Any set of rules governing expenses will necessarily be arbitrary, and will beget examples that seem unreasonable.
- The shaming of the premier into reimbursing the treasury for the cost of a leather briefcase was petty and unworthy of us.
- When I began covering Nova Scotia politics 36 years (!) ago, an MLA’s job was considered part-time; most maintained other occupations to supplement their income. Not so today.
- Upon taking office, most MLAs set aside established careers in exchange for a job with far less security than comparable positions in the private or public sector. A 2009 report on legislative salaries in Newfoundland and Labrador found that the average tenure for MLAs in that province over the preceding 20 years was 7.5 years.
- Nova Scotia cabinet ministers make less than the deputies who report to them. Backbench MLAs make less than civil servants several steps down in the hierarchy.
- Most MLAs work exceptionally long hours, especially in rural and Cape Breton ridings, where a culture of constituency service is the norm.
Yes, the compensation for MLAs should be open and above board, but the witless moralizing that has dominated the current brouhaha illustrates one reason it is not. I hope this will lead to a system in which MLAs receive a single, generous but all-encompassing salary, additional pay for cabinet service and a very short list of special house duties, and reimbursement for legitimate expenses, supported by receipts where practicable.
But if it does not, we can shoulder some of the blame ourselves. To paraphrase Pogo, “I have seen the enemy, and it is partly us.”
Give it away … or make them pay?
O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%.
Long Island’s Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday’s $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers.
Hat tip: SP.
What 10 years did to the US Economy
The Washington Post looks at what happened to the US economy over the last decade:
For the first time since the 1930s, no growth in jobs, a decline in household net worth, and falling middle-class earnings. Moneyquote:
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.
And the net worth of American households — the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts — has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.
CBRM equalization: reality check
Each year, the Province of Nova Scotia provides equalization grants to municipalities with less-than-average fiscal capacity. The unconditional transfer is based on a formula that compares a municipality’s needs and ability to pay.
In the current fiscal year, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality received $16.7 million, which amounted to 52 percent of all the equalization money given out in the entire province. The next largest recipients were Amherst at $1.2 million, and New Glasgow at $1.0 million. Put another way, CBRM got 14 times as much money as the next largest recipient.
The numbers for 2009-2010 are expected to be similar.
Death of a destructive lawsuit
The Supreme Court of Canada refusal to hear the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s equalization lawsuit was not as predictable as the rising of the sun this morning. But it was close.
The lawsuit was cynical ploy by a mayor who likes to posture as a scrapper for the little guy, but refuses to do the hard work needed to reach political solutions to the little guy’s problems.
- Contrary to popular belief, even a total victory for CBRM would not have brought the municipality a single dime. It didn’t even ask for money.
- In any case, the lawsuit had no chance of success. Aside from Mayor John Morgan and his pricey Toronto constitutional lawyer, Contrarian has been unable to find a single lawyer who thought it had any chance of success.
- Although the case suffered a mercifully early death—it was thrown out before trial—the mayor’s insistence on appealing to the highest court in the land frittered away at least $500,000 in legal bills, and wasted three five years that could better have been spent seeking a political solution. During that time, CBRM ran up another $60 million $100 million in debt its citizens cannot afford.
- The mayor now says he will seek a political solution, but he is playing a weaker hand, having demonstrated that his constitutional claims lack legal validity.
I believe the municipality has a case for greater provincial assistance in meeting basic service needs. I hope the Dexter Government, financially strapped as it is, gives the problem a fair hearing. But the mayor’s legal adventure not only delayed a solution, it encouraged the worst impulses of Cape Breton’s culture of dependency, and it reinforced the rest of the world’s weary stereotype of Cape Bretoners as people with their hands out. In all these respects, it did a disservice to the very citizens Morgan claims to champion.
Elaboration after the jump.
