Quebec mayors collect salaries during campaign
Provincial law prohibits municipal leaders from forgoing paycheque
MONTREAL— It is taken for granted across the country that mayors and councillors campaigning in the federal election for promotion to the House of Commons will temporarily give up their salaries and step away from their duties.
Be it out of respect for the taxpayers who fund the paycheques or to avoid potential conflicts, unpaid leave of absences are simply the norm.
But complaints about a star Quebec Conservative candidate, Victoriaville Mayor Alain Rayes, have brought to light a little-known provincial law that effectively prohibits local politicians seeking higher office from taking a pass on their pay.
The situation involving Rayes, who earns $90,000 annually for running the city of 43,000, came to light this week at a city council meeting when councillors approved the temporary promotion — and temporary $90,000 salary — of Victoriaville’s deputy mayor, who has taken on the brunt of the mayoral load.
A simple citizen stepped up to ask a simple question: does the city still pay Rayes’ salary?
It is a sensitive topic for a Conservative party that casts itself as the guardian of tax dollars, one that is now being blamed on a provincial law that seems to buck the Canadian trend.
“We checked what others had done and we verified with the (provincial) ministry of municipal affairs and we said that, as a city . . . we have to pay the salary. After that, what the elected official who receives the salary decides to do with it is up to him,” said Michel Lessard, Victoriaville’s director general. “He can do whatever he wants with it.”
Despite having made a show of clearing out the mayor’s office in August, Rayes told local reporters this week, “I am still the mayor of Victoriaville,” and said he works on city business three hours a day while campaigning instead of his usual 70 hours a week.
Renouncing his city salary, he said, “would have meant triggering an election tomorrow morning, with the consequences that would have.”
Quebec’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs, which sets the salaries for mayors and councillors and was consulted by the city of Victoriaville in this case, did not immediately respond to questions Friday.
But Rayes received rare bipartisan support from the Mount Royal Liberal party candidate, Anthony Housefather, who is mayor of the Côte-St-Luc, on Montreal Island, and is paid an annual $50,642 salary.
“I did check before the campaign because I’m lucky enough to be in a financial position that I could relinquish the salary . . . but the town clerk did check around and came back with the legal opinion that you’re not allowed in Quebec to relinquish the salary,” Housefather said.
Housefather has taken an unpaid leave from his full-time job as a lawyer with a multinational firm during the campaign. As a result, he said, “I probably spend as much or more time being mayor now than I did before.”
In the rest of the country, unpaid leaves are the norm in this campaign.
In Newfoundland, where Conception Bay South Mayor Ken McDonald is running for the Liberal party, the city approved his leave of absence without pay. It’s the same in the Ontario town of Nipigon, where Mayor Richard Harvey is the Tory candidate in the riding of Thunder Bay— Superior North, or in Alberta, where the Conservative hopeful in the Bow River riding is Martin Shields, the mayor of Brooks.