LILLEY: Ontario MPPs set to vote themselves a massive pay hike

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MPPs at Queen’s Park are about to get a massive raise, their first in 16 years, but they still won’t make as much as MPs in Ottawa or councillors in many major cities.

The Ford government is moving ahead with plans to increase MPP salaries from $116,550 per year to $157,350, or 75% of what a federal Member of Parliament makes.

Former premier Dalton McGuinty froze the wages of MPPs in 2009 as the world was dealing with the fallout of the global financial meltdown.

The unemployment rate sat at 8.5% in December 2009, the provincial government had joined in the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, and the overall economic outlook was bleak. A lot has changed since then — the pay freeze happened when McGuinty was still a popular premier, it was before Rob Ford became mayor of Toronto, bringing his brother, our current premier, into politics.

Lady Gaga was topping Billboard’s Canadian Hot 100 chart with Bad Romance while a new singer named Ke$ha was singing of TikTok, which was not yet an app. Avatar, the movie about blue people and another world from Canadian James Cameron, had people lined up at the box office, and back then you actually had to go to the box office to buy tickets.

All this to say, the decision to freeze wages was a long time ago, in a very different world.

The move was a politically astute one at the time by McGuinty, and it was always meant to be temporary, but no politician has dared hike the wages since. Perhaps it’s because politicians know that the idea of them getting a salary increase won’t be popular.

At $116,550, an MPP already earns more than the average worker in Ontario. Last year, according to Statistics Canada, the average full-time employee earned roughly $39 an hour per house and worked a bit over 38 hours per week meaning an annual income of about $78,000.

MPPs already earn about 48% more than the average worker, according to StatsCan, so giving them a 35% raise will seem outrageous. StatsCan also shows, though, that average full-time worker is earning 40% more than they did in 2009.

To be fair to those MPPs, their jobs never end.

If you can find me an MPP or a political staffer who works 38.8 hours per week, I’ll show you someone headed for the unemployment line. MPPs, like most politicians, surrender most of their lives to their jobs, regularly putting in 80 hours a week or more.

We ask them, many of them anyway, to move to a different city, be away from their families and answer our every concern at all hours of the day.

It’s a demanding job and for a long time now, the reward for responding to the demands of the job have been diminishing. Even after the raise to $157,350, MPPs will still make less than councillors in Toronto who earn $170,558, Brampton at $161,152, and Mississauga at $159,684.

My arguments for why this pay raise is a good idea will likely fall on deaf ears to many, especially those who think paying anything to a politician is still too much. We love to complain about the quality of the representatives we have, and we also like to complain about how much we pay them.

“Give me better wood and I will make you a better cabinet,” Sir John A. Macdonald famously said when he faced complaints about the quality of his cabinet ministers.

Well, better wood costs money and we need to pay MPPs better to attract better talent.

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The changes in salary, if passed, would take effect retroactive to the February 2025 election. The government is also proposing to allow MPPs to join the Public Service Pension Plan, the same plan offered to civil servants.

It’s not the gold-plated plan but would offer members serving for several terms a modest pension at retirement. An MPP serving for six years could start collecting at age 55 but at a 20% discount of the rate offered at 65.

Of all the proposals Doug Ford has brought forward, this one has the potential to cause him some real political headaches, but it remains the right thing to do.

blilley@postmedia.com