Democracy, Fair Pay, and Hypocrisy
A hike in NL MHA's base pay is fair... if you are a democrat
Andrew Furey gets three paycheques from the taxpayers of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Not one.
Not two.
But three.
Furey gets $95,327 as a member of the House of Assembly, the same as every member. It’s an amount unchanged since 2009 and it is less than members of the House were paid before that if you take inflation into account.
Furey gets another cheque because he’s the Premier. That puts another $65,168 in his pocket, before taxes.
But that’s not enough for Furey.
Every other Premier has found the job busy enough but Furey thinks he has spare time - remember that “my time, my dime” line from his time fishing with John Risley? - and so Furey moonlights as a surgeon,. For that he can earn as much as $68,000, as he did in 2022 or he can pull in $23,000, as he did last year.
That’s right. Just by pulling a few shifts here and there during the year, Furey made more moonlighting in 2022 than he got paid as Premier. Regardless of how much it is, that extra pay for moonlighting is interesting because in 2007, this issue of moonlighting by politicians came up. Plenty of MHAs complained to a commissioner sent to investigate the House that there was a big gap between what they made in their careers and what they were paid as members of the House.
Chief Justice Derek Greene took it all in, weighed the concerns, and recommended that ordinary members of the House ought to be able to keep up their professional certification and that they could do that provided they the Speaker and the members of the House knew. There’s also a rule that let’s members declare they have another full-time job and so they could get less pay as an MHA. The last one to do that was Jack Harris.
Greene didn’t discuss what members of Cabinet should do but frankly, the general expectation since the 1980s has been that if you are in Cabinet, you don’t have time to do any other work on top of being in Cabinet and in the House. And if you do, you shouldn’t simply because of the potential conflicts of interest and because you also have another job anyway, namely representing your constituents in the House of Assembly. Doing both those jobs properly should take up all your time that isn’t spent, sleeping, eating, being with family, taking a vacation, or doing all those other things to keep you sane and healthy. It used to be common for lawyers to keep up a law practice while in Cabinet, for example, but that went out the window once Bill Marshall retired 40 odd years ago and went to the bench.
That old way of thinking also reflected the very old-fashioned idea that politics was a game for the wealthier among us. Pay for politicians was measly. They deliberately called an “indemnity” rather than pay or salary, as the Morgan Commission noted in its landmark 1989 report on salaries and other pay for members of the House, based on the 19th century view that the pay needed to be high enough to compensate the better class for taking a bit of time from their usual work to run the place while keeping low enough to deter the riff raff from wanting a seat among their betters in the legislature.
In his case, Andrew Furey doesn’t need to work as a doctor while he’s in politics. He is registered with the College and can therefore call himself Doctor Andrew Furey all the while he isn’t treating patients. The title comes from the degree by the way, not his active practice. Like the lawyers in his Cabinet, Furey could just switch his status to “non-practicing” and then go back to work as a physician once he was done with being a doctor.
Once he leaves politics, which he will do very shortly, getting back into practice after an absence is simply a brief re-check of his competence if he’s not treated a patient in more than three years. Furey will still have to do something extra work anyway if he goes back to full-time surgical practice even with his moonlighting because there’s no way he could keep up to speed the same as a full-timer on doing actual surgeries while also holding down another couple of full-time jobs.
Furey’s moonlighting on top of being an MHA and Premier makes hypocritical his opposition to a recent recommendation that the House raise the base pay for members of the House. There’s no sign of genuine concern for the poor among us, and certainly no principle beyond whatever motive his Brain Trust had for giving him the cheesy line about people making ends meet.
You can tell Furey has not taken a reasoned position based on facts, principles, and values for three simple reasons. First, he doesn’t have a good reason for opposing the increase. He has a superficial excuse and Furey’s a own example makes it plain how much his argument is not just an excuse but a superficial one.
Furey told reporters he opposes the hike because he doesn’t think “that's appropriate at this time with other families struggling with the cost of living right now.” If he is so concerned about people making ends meet, then those same people are the ones paying his *third* salary, and the one that is entirely unnecessary for him to draw. Yet there he is pulling shifts without a hint his conscience is bothered.
Let’s put some meaning on that, some context. The people having the hardest time making ends meet are those with the midpoint income per person or per household in the province. That mid-point is not the average paycheque size. It’s the number you get if you find out what half the population is making.
Best figures we’ve got are Statistics Canada’s numbers from the 2021 census. Half the population of Newfoundland and Labrador aged 15 years and over made $36,800 a year before taxes from all sources in 2020 or less.
$36,800.
So in his moonlighting gig alone in 2022, Andrew Furey made almost double that or roughly what the median two-person household brought in. Same goes for his pay just for being Premier. Almost as much as the median household income.
So if Andrew Furey was so concerned about people making ends meet or even the burden on their public purse of the increase, he’d stop playing doctor on the weekends. Let that salary he is claiming go to hire a full-time doctor somewhere in the province. Or better still, he could go back to being a doctor full-time because as we know from Furey’s own lips, the new ortho clinic he announced for St. Clare’s has no doctors. He could be the first one. No one would fault him for the choice as it would be 100% consistent with public service and his stated concern for people finding it tough to make ends meet. Actions speak louder than words and so far, Furey’s actions drown out any noble sentiment in his words.
The second reason you can tell his is not a position of fact, reason, and principle, is that Furey told reporters that he was just offering his opinion, as if he had no way of influencing what the government position would be on the MHA hike. Any time someone with power - and especially when the someone is the Premier - any time someone with power denies they have power, know it is a lie. A deliberate falsehood. And that should tell you all that you need to know about his argument on what we pay members of the House of Assembly.
Third, as commissioner Heather Jacobs titled her report, how we treat our politicians reflects how we view democracy, so Furey is making it clear that - consistent with the way the House runs since he’s been Premier - Furey has little regard for the House and democracy to boot. So, Furey’s not really concerned so much for folks finding it financially tough as much as he appears to be pushing another agenda. Could be as trivial as his own need to look good. Could be something darker, like being anti-democratic. Whatever Furey’s motive for the independent commissioner’s advice - including just unbelievable shallowness - it isn’t about the folks struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food in their kids’ mouths.
One thing for sure, Furey’s position is certainly in line with the job his old family friend Danny Williams started of gutting the House of Assembly. These days, following Danny’s lead, the House even less, making it the slackest Assembly in Newfoundland since 1855. There’s less time that even Williams allowed for debate such that Furey and his crowd ram laws into place with absolutely no real debate. There’s more real debate in North Korea than happens in Newfoundland and Labradors. Furey and his colleagues deliberately make it impossible for *anyone* outside their narrow circle to understand what is going in the province. Bills are law before people outside the House even have a chance to read them. The Liberals have reduced the House to a pathetic rubber stamp, a charade, and a joke and that is not by accident.
The current state of the House continues the steady and deliberate actions of Premier after Premier starting with Danny Williams to make the House as small and ineffective as possible. The Pea Seas and Liberals conspired in 2015 to reduce the size of the House, which means the ordinary people of the province have *less* representation than before. Freezing salaries just discourages people from running for office in the first place, which makes the state of democracy in the province all the worse.
Fewer people in the House makes it easier to form a government - that was the 2015 thinking - but coupled with frozen salaries, it also makes the individual members easier for any Premier to use extra pay for positions that he appoints in the House and in Cabinet as a way of controlling the people who are supposed to guarding the public purse. Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 21st century is as ethically bankrupt as it was a century and more ago and only resembles democracy as a crude sketch, rather than embody it fully as you might expect.
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Members of the House of Assembly are the only workers in the whole of Newfoundland and Labrador whose wages have been frozen since 2009. Everyone - literally everyone - else has seen a hike in the past 15 years so that at the very least they can keep up with inflation. Not so for politicians, the people we elect to make laws and keep an eye on government waste on our collective behalf.
The result of the wage freeze is that the purchasing power of an MHA’s salary is dramatically less today than it was 15 years ago. The $95,000 they make is today worth roughly $67,500 in 2009 dollars. If you are having a hard time making ends meet, if you are one of those people Furey is supposedly worried about, imagine if *you* had to live on 30% less than you did in 2009. Furey certainly doesn’t. His combined pay from three jobs is not far off what he billed in 2020 as a doctor.
The proposed wage hike in Heather Jacob’s report would bring the base pay for a member of the House of Assembly up to $120,000 a year. That’s hardly a big salary for the responsibilities that go with being a member of the House of Assembly. That’s still less than they’d make if the House had followed earlier recommendations and given them the same increases as the Public Service. In fact, if MHAs had only covered the cost of inflation on their own pay since 2009, they’d be making a bit little less than $134,500. With that kind of salary it would a lot easier to attract more people as candidates and you’d also have MHAs not quite so ready to keep their mouths’ shut in exchange for this little job or that little extra.
Jacob’s proposed increase is only too much if you are either completely ignorant of the facts or have some ulterior motive for your opposition to paying the people who represent you a salary that would keep them relatively speaking where they were - in actual terms - before the turn of the century.
Jacob’s proposed pay hike for MHAs is fair and reasonable. It is actually less than the MHAs deserve, which, in all fairness, would be to have kept pace with inflation. There is no principled basis for opposing her report if you are a democrat. There are simply made up excuses to oppose it. Nor are there any excuses for keeping the House as small as it is, without functioning committees, and generally as dysfunctional as it is but then again, this hasn’t been a democracy worth of the name for 20 years..
In fact, to claim, as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation does, that MHAs don’t deserve a raise because they aren’t doing their jobs is to reinforce in as hypocritical a way possible the appalling anti-democratic attitudes that have put the House in the state it is in. Arguably, those attitudes have produced all the things CTF rightly criticises from chronic overspending to even the relatively low average income in the province.
More members, better paid, and with the tools to do their jobs could produce the changes in policy needed to achieve what CTF and others want. To further slash the House only makes sense if you want to see more corruption, more mismanagement and ultimately the near elimination of the House to everything except the bare minimum of what it is required to do by the Constitution.
We elect members to the House of Assembly to enact laws, to vote funds for important things like health care, roads, hospitals, and education, and to guard the public purse against waste and left and stupidity. The current House cannot do any of that with integrity and certainly cannot do the last bit, the most important of the three functions, because we have all collectively allowed a handful to undermine it over a very long time. There’s is a connection between chronic overspending and stupid policies like Muskrat Falls and wind and the deliberate gutting of the House of Assembly. Lack of accountability and conflict of interest are the hallmarks of the post-2003 political world. Cutting political pay will not change that but it arguably will make it immensely worse.
Most of Jacobs’ other recommendations are minor adjustments to existing practices. The fact the House still does not have functioning committees is beyond the scope of her job but we would do well to add that to our list of reforms desperately needed..
What we should notice most in this latest twist in the tale, though, is that the Premier has already taken a public stand against the report’s key recommendation, the one that would do the most to improve the House, attract candidates let alone better ones, and reverse the miserable trend started under Danny Williams and carried on by each of his successors. The next election, if Furey is a candidate - and that is still a very large “if” to that - anyone concerned about the state of the province would do well to make note of how Furey stood against a fundamental question of democracy in our province repeatedly and, if they are democrats themselves, vote accordingly. If they are not, they’ll send yet another government of the same motive back to finish the job the Furey’s old family started.
