Five Progressive Conservative MPs voted against opposition attempts during Thursday’s meeting of the Nova Scotia legislature’s legislative amendments committee to add a child care fund to the bill that blocks a salary increase for politicians pending.
The bill passing the House will block a binding 12.6 percent pay increase recommended in a report by an independent pay review committee. It would have been the first increase in MPs in about a decade. All three parties have said they support forgoing the pay raise.
The bill only addresses the pay raise, but Democratic Rep. Lisa Lachance noted that the report also makes non-binding recommendations aimed at making the House more accessible to a more diverse group of people. Among the recommendations are a fund to cover child care for lawmakers when doing business with the House and exploring why a seat reserved for a Mi’kmaw representative has never been filled.
“I am disappointed, indeed, that you are calling this House back and not spending time on the other critical issues that are raised in this report, binding or not,” Lachance told Conservative MPs across the table.
‘A PR trick’
Conservative MPs Trevor Boudreau, Chris Palmer, Kent Smith, Dave Ritcey and Brad Johns, the committee’s chairman, voted against Lachance’s amendment. They also voted against a similar amendment by Liberal MP Brendan Maguire, which, along with a call for a childcare fund, wanted to consult with Mi’kmaw lawyers to examine why no one has ever held the seat Designated Mi’kmaw.
Maguire said he believes the only reason Premier Tim Houston recalled the Legislature to deal with the pay raise was to curry favor with the public. The government’s bill also includes a reduction in the prime minister’s salary by about $11,200. Like Lachance, Maguire said he’s concerned the government isn’t interested in addressing the report’s other recommendations.
“This was a PR stunt,” he said. “I think [the government] I thought they could come in and get a surge in the polls.”
Tory MLA says work is already happening
Smith said the government did not see a need to support a dedicated childcare fund for MLAs because a program to create universal affordable childcare was already underway. He said he trusts his colleague Karla MacFarlane, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, to explore issues related to the dedicated Mi’kmaw seat.
While Houston has said he believes the nonbinding recommendations are worth looking at, neither he nor any of his caucus colleagues Thursday provided a timeline for when that might happen. Opposition MPs say they are concerned these matters will be forgotten without a commitment to act.
Before debate on the amendments, the committee heard from two people on the bill.
The salary increase is reasonable
Hammonds Plains resident Tim Pratt said he worries that blocking the pay raise amounts to a political game that will ultimately make it harder for some people to run.
Pratt said the job of MLA is an important, difficult and labor-intensive task that requires compensation that reflects the seriousness of the office and makes it accessible to anyone who wants to put their name on the ballot.
“To be able to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to leave my role and take less money to serve,’ is a position of privilege,” he told the committee.
“You have to be able to have the means and the financial security in your home to be able to take that cut in pay that it would take to serve. … We have to understand that a wage freeze is going to make this problem even worse.”
Deputies earn about $89,000 a year. The Prime Minister, party leaders, cabinet ministers and the Speaker of the House receive additional compensation.
Hammonds Plains resident Tim Pratt says MPs freezing their own salaries and ignoring the recommendations of an independent panel is politicizing the issue. (Michael Gorman/CBC)
Pratt suggested that if lawmakers don’t want the raise, they could donate the extra money, which amounts to about $11,000 a year, to charity. He said a further step that could address public concerns about MLAs’ salaries would be to tie any increase to the amount by which income assistance rates rise.
“Income assistance has not kept up with inflation, not close, and every party has had an opportunity to link that to something and no party has.”
The other presenter on Thursday was Jay Goldberg, the acting Atlantic director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Goldberg congratulated MPs on the decision to forgo the pay rise and cut the salary for the prime minister. He also asked MPs to deal with the issue of bracket warming.
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