MLAs give themselves 3.5% raise

Comes year after they reduced pay by same amount

A year after Saskatchewan politicians said they wanted to “show leadership” by cutting their own salaries by 3.5 per cent, MLAs have increased their salary back to the old amount.

In March 2017, MLAs — led by the Saskatchewan Party — took the 3.5-per-cent reduction on the heels of a deficit budget.

At the time, the rationale for doing so was because the province was aiming to reduce public sector wages by 3.5 per cent, a plan that was met with opposition by unions and has since been abandoned.

“I have always said — we will not ask other public sector workers to do anything we aren’t prepared to do ourselves as elected officials,” then-premier Brad Wall said in a statement at the time.

Fast-forward one year and MLAs have reversed the 3.5-percent cut.

In real dollars, MLAs went from making $96,183 to $92,816.59 last year. The are now back to their former salary. The 2017 reduction also applied to out-of-scope employees working in the public sector. They also saw a 3.5-per-cent boost this year, according to Sask. Party MLA Jeremy Harrison, who sits on the board responsible for setting MLA wages.

In total, the province is paying roughly $700,000 more for MLA and out-of-scope wages in 2018 than it did in 2017.

Asked how the public should feel about the increases, given taxes and the cost of living have increased significantly in the past year, Harrison said, “the reality is it’s been a 1.6-per-cent increase (for MLAs) over four years” and that is “probably in line or less than what you would see elsewhere” in the province.

On average, Saskatchewan residents make around $53,000 a year — or about $43,000 less than a Saskatchewan MLA. Over that same four-year period, average weekly earnings in Saskatchewan have increased by roughly four per cent.

Harrison maintained the province would not ask public sector unions to do anything government MLAs were not willing to do themselves.

More than half of the province’s 40 public sector unions are currently negotiating new contracts. They resolutely rejected the Sask. Party government’s plan to reduce spending on wages by 3.5 per cent.

In November, the government proposed that salaries for Saskatchewan’s 13,500 teachers be cut by 3.67 per cent, that comparable savings be found through reductions to employee benefit plans, or that a 3.5-per-cent cut in total compensation happen through a combination of reductions. Those negotiations are now before an arbitration board.

Members of the Saskatchewan Government Employees Union (SGEU) rejected an offer in April, which would have seen members earn wage increases of zero, zero, one and two per cent over four years. (The last contract expired at the end of September 2016, meaning the first two years without increases would have been partially retroactive.)

NDP Leader Ryan Meili said the 3.5-per-cent wage cut that Sask. Party members forced MLAs to take was a “publicity stunt.”

“(It) wasn’t about any sense of fiscal responsibility, it was to try to make the case for them to then go and apply that same 3.5-per-cent cut to workers across the province, and we always thought that was a really bad idea,” he said.