RUSSELL WANGERSKY
The Western Star

“They say this is the city
The city of angels
All I see is dead wings.”
— The Distillers, “City of Angels”

I’ll admit that, after some 25 years of reporting on politicians, I might be a little jaded.

But looking at the latest commission touring the province to examine the rates of pay for this province’s members of the House of Assembly, I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t time for a fundamental change.

That’s because you hear the same old arguments: we have to keep up with other politicians, and the ever-popular, without good money you can’t attract good people to serve in the house.

That is, of course, why skilled, highly paid lawyers put their names in for less-well-paying jobs as judges.

Hopefully, just as lawyers appreciate the justice system (it’s easy and cheap to say they don’t, but it’s not true), would-be politicians can see the value and personal rewards of public service.

And do you really want a House of Assembly full of politicians whose primary driver is the amount of money they can make? That’s a recipe for pocket-filling.

We’re already reaping that whirlwind — it’s called the constituency allowance greedfest, or as one regular letter-writer recently called it, the “con-all.”

Still, it is in some ways a fair argument: people do like to be paid as professionals for the work they do, and provincial politics can entail a hefty amount of work.

Pay levels should reflect that — to a point.

Justice Derek Green, in his report on the constituency allowance scandal, pointed out that this province’s MHAs have to be paid in a clear, transparent way. In the past, part of MHAs’ pay was a tax-free allowance that masked their true benefits.

Green also suggested that “the best comparator for setting future salary levels for MHAs is the salary levels of members in other provincial and territorial jurisdictions, in particular, those in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and in other Atlantic provinces.”

He noted that “given the relatively high level of this province’s current MHA salaries when compared to that peer group, it was decided that no salary increase … should be recommended at this time.”

But that is a bit of a mug’s game: in the past, you could watch the salaries of provincial politicians ping-pong up across the country.

A government with a strong mandate would get in one province and, safe at the beginning of an administration’s tenure, salaries would move up in that jurisdiction.Suddenly, every other legislature in the country would say they were “forced” to keep up with the Joneses.

Here’s an idea: why not tie MHA salaries to the fortunes of the rest of the province and its people? It’s a bit complicated — but no more so than the compensation schemes used to determine the pay of some other executives.

You could use a sort of “best-situation” analysis to decide whether MHAs deserved an increase, or, for that matter, a decrease in their annual pay.

Start, for example, with the average annual increase of the mean industrial wage in the province, and say that MHAs can see their pay increase by as much as 115 per cent of that industrial wage percentage — if their performance warrants. At the same time, if they underperformed, you could knock their pay down by as much as 100 per cent of the average annual increase for everyone else — or even further, for especially bad performances.

How do you measure performance? Well, first of all, not by something bogus like the province’s gross domestic product. The amount of iron ore, nickel and oil hauled out of this province, (often bought, sold and processed somewhere else) is no measure of whether provincial politicians are doing a good job.

Calculate their performance on a quality of living index.

And bring lots to bear on it: unemployment levels, a comparison of overall pay rates here against other provinces, the increase in disposable income, a reference to hospital wait-times, the comparative performance of the province’s primary and secondary students in national testing, fiscal responsibility (so that politicians lose points if we run a deficit while other provinces don’t), to start.

Factor in the baseline performance of individual markers: take wage-earners in the offshore, the fishery, the service sector, and other industries, and calculate in whether individuals in those jobs are doing better in a year, or worse.

You could make the analysis fit the province, both urban and rural. It would give clear goals to politicians — and at the end of the year, they’d have an empirical measure of how well they were doing.

If think-tanks can calculate Canada’s relative performance on a worldwide “happiness index,” we can certainly set a formula that can show whether, at the end of the year, our citizens are better off or worse off than we were the year before.

“Oh,” politicians might complain, “We could ending up losing pay because of economic circumstances that are out of our control!”

Well, wake up, boys and girls: everyone else does that already.

So, instead of convening a commission every legislative session to see if our politicians are keeping up financially with their neighbouring politicians, let’s have a commission meet to refine the performance formula to address current goals.

It sounds complicated, but it needn’t be.

And if you really wanted to get the attention of politicians who focus on salary, calculate the percentage change in salary at the end of the year, and make it retroactive for the year that’s passed.

That way, they might get a bonus for a job well done.

And politicians who spend a year without their eye on the interests of the rest of the province might end up having to actually pay money back.

Russell Wangersky is commentary editor of the St. John’s Telegram.

He can be reached by email at rwanger@thetelegram.com.