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.
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Twenty years ago, in 2006, I wrote a series of columns on the salaries of civic and provincial bureaucrats.
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The public had begun to take note that in certain sectors of government, many bureaucrats enjoyed salaries and unassailable benefits more typical of princelings than public servants.
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City managers, city deputy directors and police chiefs were earning not only twice that of what their cities’ mayors did, but sometimes as much as $100,000 more.
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There were, as there are now, numerous examples of inexplicable pay hikes. And there were, again as now, examples of severance packages being negotiated out of the public eye. One was rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of $800,000 — eye-popping then, nothing out of the ordinary now.
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Reasons for these severance packages were, and still are, never given, or why getting your ass drop-kicked out the door deserves such munificence. Twenty years down the road, and nothing has changed.
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No, wait … I’ll amend that. Something has changed. Politicians — especially in the civic arena — wised up, caught up, and also began plundering expense accounts like teens burning through dad’s Visa. They travel at public expense on “fact-finding” missions — the facts of which could easily be found on Google or a phone call.
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When pressed on the wages and benefits that bureaucrats and politicians in the public sector enjoy — as opposed to those which all us drudges in the private sector do not — governments, as they did 20 years ago, trot out the usual bull excuses designed to justify their self-serving greed.
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Such as:
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• You have to spend money to attract good people.
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• Salaries and benefits are much greater in the private sector than they are in the public sector.
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• Modern government bodies resemble huge corporations with thousands of employees, so those who manage those government bodies should enjoy benefits commensurate with that of the private sector.
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I have trouble with all such excuses.
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For one thing, if life is so much better in the executive levels of the private sector, what’s stopping those public-sector executives from migrating there? Altruism? A devotion to public service? Colour me sceptical.
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And to those who insist that their compensation should equal that of those in the private sector, I’d say sure, if you were paid by shareholders who insist they earn a 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 incompetents the door. With a severance package.
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As for the idea that governments have to spend money to attract good people, this is not only unproven, but, in light of the many 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 the taxpayers’ expense in which salaries continually leap-frog above each other from constituency to constituency. It’s the gift designed to keep on giving.
