OPINION: Facts Matter

Debating Council Salaries Should Start With the Truth

“Their pay has been the same for 25 years.” - CTV NEWS

“The last time council’s pay went up was over 25 years ago.” - BayToday/Nugget

Next week, West Nipissing council will officially pass a motion enacting a 27% salary increase for themselves. This has been a much talked about issue locally over the last month. In March council received a consultant’s report outlining comparable municipalities that could help justify increasing their salaries by 27-37%. The consultant did not use any neighbouring municipalities like Markstay-Warren or French River which face many of the same issues and obligations.

Still, it could be argued that to attract better politicians, we need more competitive salaries. But this debate must be based on facts.

When this topic was first discussed, councillor Rolly Larabie stated multiple times that councillors have not received a raise in 25 years. His justification for implementing a raise was the cost of living.

Then, this week, councillor Daniel Gagné repeated the same lines. He stated that council has not received a raise in 20 years and that due to the rising cost of living, it was “overdue”.

Why does this matter? Because these are outright lies. First, council has received raises every single year since 1999 based on the annual CPI (Consumer Price Index). In 2023, council’s raise was 6.1%. Since 2022, council’s salaries have gone up 15%.

Second, if Larabie and Gagné simply meant to state that council has not received raises, other than cost of living increases, then why continue to reference inflation as a justification for the raise?

Media Publishes the Lies

In the following weeks, local journalists took Larabie and Gagné’s word and published these lies. CTV News led their news article and their 6 o’clock segment with “Their pay has been the same for 25 years”. BayToday and the North Bay Nugget both wrote “The last time council’s pay went up was over 25 years ago.” In both instances, readers or listeners are given absolutely no indication that councillors have indeed received annual increases.

I reached out to one of these reporters and asked about this omission. His response was that he was unaware that the council policy gave them CPI increases every year. He stated that he took the “no raise in 25 years” comment from Larabie’s remarks and said he would now look into it. Unsurprisingly these news articles have not been corrected or retracted.

So the average taxpayer is left with a completely misleading narrative and a lie.

In any other context, the media or the average reader would interpret a 6% annual increase as a raise regardless of if it was a CPI adjustment. The average West Nipissing resident has not received a 15% raise since 2022, so how can council claim that their salaries have not gone up?

Pattern of Lies

Unfortunately some councillors have become a little too comfortable lying to the public. When council was approving a 4.6% tax increase a few months ago, councillor Gagné told the public another outright lie. He claimed that council had only been increasing taxes by the bare minimum and needed a bigger increase for 2025.

But…the 2024 tax increase was 4.67% and the 2023 increase was 4.75%. So his claim that 2025 4.6% was needed to make up for the prior lower increases was incredibly misleading.

How Council Should Justify a Wage Increase

In order to justify a wage increase beyond the rising cost of living, council would have to justify that the job has significantly changed or that their performance merits it.

Since 1999, this municipality’s population has barely changed. The level of municipal services has not changed either. Council has always had two (non mandatory) meetings each month. The only difference is that in 2025, councillors now have the option to attend any number of meetings via Zoom allowing them to not even leave their homes.

The one thing Gagné was right about was, “We’re not doing much new stuff in West Nipissing.”

On the merits, it’s very difficult to justify why the councillor of 2025 deserves a higher wage (adjusted for inflation) than the one who took the job in 1999. Their biggest duty is to make sure our tax dollars are well spent. Although the municipality has not changed much in size or level of service, somehow this municipality collects significantly more (even adjusted for inflation) than it did 5, 10, or 20 years ago.

Is there any profession or business where the employees would merit a raise based on their ability to increase costs without increasing sales, services or revenue? Is there any profession or business that would be allowed to vote themselves a 27% raise without any negotiating party on the other side of the table?

Solution

There is an easy solution to this dilemma. As was proposed by three councillors at the last meeting, why not make any wage increase effective the next term? This would easily eliminate any conflict of interest and would save the municipality $75,000, which could be used on basketball courts or pickleball courts.

But regardless of what this council decides, debates (which the media relies on for facts), need to be grounded in truth. Last week, we heard that taxpayers spent over $5,000 investigating innocent social media comments by councillors. I believe that knowingly lying to the public (“we have never received a raise”) is a much bigger violation of the councillor code of conduct.

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