Council’s pay raise was the right move

About a year ago, this space argued that people in several types of jobs are underpaid relative to their importance to our community, such as educational assistants, personal support workers and school bus drivers. City councillors were also on the list, an assertion that still stands even with the recent approval of a three per cent raise for Kawartha Lakes councillors each year for the next four years.

The move attracted the usual criticism: local residents buckling under the weight of higher food and gas prices will not be receiving guaranteed pay increases over the next four years. True, although there are also plenty of local people who will see their incomes rise as a result of negotiated contracts.

It’s an argument to be careful with, though. Do we really want the remuneration for the people deciding the future of our city and the allocation of our tax dollars to be based on the lowest increases in the general workforce? If so, are we comfortable turning the rationale around to justify not giving raises to other non-unionized workers?

The official fiction persists that being a councillor is a part-time job. The city’s website suggests a baseline of about 60 hours a month plus as much other time as the councillor wants to devote.

The reality is that the work will literally fill every available hour. To quote last May’s editorial, “When you’re a councillor in a city like ours, you’re never really off the clock; constituents will feel quite free to bend your ear when you’re out for dinner, watching your grandkids play ball or heading into church.”

Ideally, we’d dispense with the pretense that a councillor’s job is anything but full-time. If we treat it as such, we’d enable a wider range of people to run beyond those willing to sacrifice other income or whose pension or personal finances permit.

Any member of the public complaining about councillors’ pay should be required to sit through an hour or two of the kind of vitriol our elected representatives regularly receive. Being a good councillor requires intelligence, open-mindedness, strong ethics, a thick skin, a sense of humour, collegiality and a deep commitment to the good of our city. We are fortunate to have had a strong group of councillors for the past four years; we shouldn’t expect them to take on such important, demanding work without fair compensation.

It’s also entirely appropriate for the outgoing council to vote on their successors’ rate of pay. When new council members take their places later this year, they need to be free to focus on learning to be effective in their jobs rather than worrying about blowback from a salary decision.