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British Columbia
Bureaucrats’ pay hikes nothing short of gangsterism
By Kevin Potvin
We have laws dealing with gangsters and criminal conspiracies, and we ought to use them
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The announcement this week by British Columbia’s (neo) Liberal government led by Premier Gordon Campbell that senior bureaucrats will be receiving retroactive pay increases of up to 43% finally ends the question of entrenched systematic corruption in Canadian governing regimes. We are living under some of the most corrupt governments anywhere in the world, it is now clear.
The fact that this out-and-out theft of public funds is announced rather than hidden doesn’t make it less an instance of gross corruption than, say, actual cash grabbed by hand at night in the Nigerian treasury department. Rather, makes it more an instance of gross corruption: the apparent transparency serves only to attempt to legitimize the theft and so only invites the further charge of a criminal frame of mind and an attempted cover-up.
Nor does the fact that this theft of public funds was signed over by elected officials in the legislature reduce the charge of corruption. It only adds to the charges one of criminal conspiracy: the senior bureaucrats in receipt of the proceeds of this crime were put into their positions by the same elected officials. They were all friends and associates prior to either becoming elected officials or appointed bureaucrats. Now that some are exploiting their positions to hugely enrich others within their small social circle all at the expense of the public purse smacks of a criminal conspiracy.
Dan’s Homebrewing Supplies, 693 East Hastings, is the place for all your home-brew ideas. You can’t get more local than right at home, and the quality you’ll make is better than you can buy.
The fact that the government employed the services of a consultant who advised that there should be a pay raise, and advised how much that should be, does not legitimize the theft to any degree, but only adds yet another charge to the government’s rap sheet: that of fraud.
Executive compensation consultants are hired to look at the pay offered to executives in the free market of private enterprise to establish what similar work at a similar level of expertise in the non-competitive public sector should be compensated with in terms of pay. The idea is that a certain size of budget and a certain size of staff are useful measuring tools to compare executive compensation in the private sector to that in the public sector.
The comparison however is faulty in major ways. In the private sector, there is one very good and very clear measure of performance: stock price on the market, or in the case of non-traded stock, profit on the bottom line. If a CEO does a terrible job, the company could lose money or even go bankrupt and cease to exist. The company’s income is entirely dependent on sales of whatever it is the company produces or offers and there are always other companies every day searching for ways, and often succeeding, to reduce another company’s sales and profits. Finally, the entire expenditures a private sector company makes is discretionary: the entire operating budget of a private company is a result of choices made by the executives of that company.
The performance of a public sector ministry, by comparison, is not so easily measured because government ministries are not intended to make profit and have no stock prices to inflate. If the executives in a ministry do a terrible job, there is no risk of the ministry losing money or ceasing to exist as a result. The ministry’s income is mostly independent of performance: it doesn’t sell things to a market that has choice, it’s income is legally guaranteed under the legislation of the tax act. Ministries also have a legally-protected monopoly over the services they offer and there are never competing bodies ever looking to chip away at sales. And the expenditures of a public sector ministry are almost entirely non-discretionary. Most of the spending in a ministry is unavoidable and unchangeable and has nothing to do with the choices made by the executives running the ministry.
Under these conditions, to compare the work a private sector executive performs to the work a public sector senior bureaucrat performs is nothing short of fraudulent. The size of budgets and the number of staff cannot be compared when the budget of one is, on both sides of the income and expense ledger, a product of free market sales and choices, and the budget of the other is almost entirely a product of mandated spending and forced-tax-supported subsidy.
The Premier has defended this theft, cover-up, criminal conspiracy and fraud by claiming that the pay-off is required to recruit and retain the quality of executives the bureaucracies need to function effectively. This is a lie. There has never been any peer-reviewed, third-party objective study produced by any accredited research institution that has shown that public sector executive job descriptions require any skills beyond your average private sector middle manager. Your local MacDonald’s manager with three years experience has all the tools and skills and experience necessary to run any of the British Columbia ministries. The jobs could be offered for similar compensation—something in the neighbourhood of $50,000, or one-seventh what the bureaucrats are now offered, and we would end up with people just as competent in those positions. They aren’t very hard to run; the biggest challenge is the potential for public embarrassment if you’re caught screwing up.
The fact this theft was announced in mid-summer shows the gangsters in the legislature know they couldn’t possibly engineer their heist under normal circumstances—and incidentally demonstrates they know full well they are gangsters engineering a heist for their associates.
When gangsters engage in pre-meditated theft, cover-up, conspiracy and fraud to the tune of millions of dollars, the public demands their houses be broken into, guns be pointed in their faces, their hands bound behind their backs, their heads covered with hoods, and that they be kidnapped, thrown into the back of windowless vans and then shoved into dark rooms with bars on the windows and doors where they are fed barely edible subsistence diets for many years if not the rest of their lives.
Should the fact the gangsters in question wear blue pin-striped gang colours and use a standard handshake for gang hand signs make any difference in how the public deals with their gangsterism? No, but the difference is, the ministry of the solicitor general runs the police, another part of the thieving, conspiring, fraudulent gang, and the ministry of the attorney general runs the courts and the jails, another government bureaucracy, another part of the gang, and they’re as likely to act in the public interest as the driver of the stolen truck is to return the tools in the back to the rightful owner after the bank job.
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