It’s time to reduce the salaries in our bureaucracies

By Lethbridge Herald on November 25, 2022.

Editor:

It is quite clear that due to out-of-control spending and poor negotiation, the bureaucracy of the federal and most provincial jurisdictions in Canada has ballooned. For example, in Ontario, the amount of workers on the Sunshine List (a list of workers making over $100,000 a year in Ontario) has grown exponentially from 4,494 workers in 1996 to a whopping 244,390 making that amount last year.

There are therefore 54 times more people on the list now. As a result of the government essentially printing money to pay for these exhorbitant salaries, inflation has gone up and up and up. The recent education workers strike/political action in Ontario highlighted the poorest government paid workers, but what about these 250,000 workers at the top of the food chain? By making $100,000 or more a year do they really need to access the food bank, etc., be poor, have no money for anything like the poorest education workers do, or can we assume that they are basically swimming in money? I assume the latter. Therefore, the government has no moral loyalty or desire for social justice for such rich public servants. So then, cut their salaries drastically! 

Make the poor richer, and make the rich poorer – this is the mantra of a progressive taxation system that takes more from the wealthy. But what is taken from the rich 250,000 government of Ontario employees? Nothing (except tax). There should be a tax, a surcharge, a “sunshine” surcharge. All monies earned over $100,000 should be considered excessive, so that $20,000 over $100,000 in one year, should be considered like $100,000 minus $20,000 the next year. So every employee who made $120,000 last year should receive $80,000 this year for the same amount of work. This is to make up for the $20,000 they shouldn’t have been paid, from a moral perspective. 

If they leave or retire, then good, more room for younger employees. Out with the old, in with the new. Or don’t even rehire. Down with the rich bureaucracy sucking off the fat of the taxpayers, off with their parasitic ways, off with their monopolistic self-interested control of the civil service. Take the billions that are saved from cutting this fat and throw it from airplanes on to the crowds, as you probably will do more social good that way for at least some of the money will end up in the hands of the poor. 

Take the universities, for example. As a case study, let’s look at one English professor. He made $100,000 20 years ago, but then steadily increased to earning $200,000 a year. 

Are his skills so rare, in demand and hard to find that you need to pay him $2 million over the course of 20 years? No, of course not. Pay the same professor $60,000 a year and you will get the same result. There is no qualitative improvement that comes from spending more than $60,000 on a professor, or on any course instructor. If all educational institutions collectively lowered their salary for most professors, it would save billions with little to no effect on the quality of education. Hope they saved up their money when their salary at $150,000 should have been $60,000. 

I call for a province-wide and Canada-wide pay freeze and pay reduction. The current salary of an MPP in Ontario, for instance, is $116,500, which makes the MPP earn less than probably 200,000 other government employees. Cut these employees. Put the salaries into a reverse dimension, make those earning over $100,000 taste what it feels like to be like the low-paying worker that the vast majority are. In fact, restart the salaries of the entire bureaucracy! The only jobs that should be high paying are for those where genuine brain drain can occur, like for instance for doctors and specialists, who can easily go to the U.S. or another country to do their profession for more salary. If anyone can do their job, that job must start at $40,000. Time to turn back the clock on government salaries – it is 1990 all over again. 

Robert Nelly

Lethbridge