Peter F. Trent: City employees' cushy pay packets cost taxpayers

My mother’s side of the family were British intellectual socialists; they were an impractical lot who embraced socialism with a religious-like fervour — unlike, say, my sage left-wing friend Julius Grey.

Unionism was an article of faith with my maternal relatives. They would be shocked today how public-sector unions have made millionaires out of swivel servants, especially that cosseted bunch working for the City of Montreal.

Sixty years ago, one-third of Canadian employees were unionized, all of them working in the private sector. Then public-sector unions were declared legal. Today, only 15 per cent of the Canadian private sector remains unionized, yet 77 per cent of government workers across Canada — 86 per cent in Quebec — belong to a union.

No one should be surprised that this union hammerlock on the public sector has resulted in higher salaries and benefits, but nowhere is it more dramatic than in Quebec’s municipalities. Although the days of intimidation and crippling strikes are behind us, their malign legacy lives on in the unjustified remuneration levels of today’s municipal employees.

Am I exaggerating or unfair? Consider: the Institut de la statistique du Québec (ISQ) calculates that most Quebec municipalities, on average, pay their employees $93,200 a year including benefits. Provincial government employees make do with an average of $70,500 for comparable jobs. With hours of work factored in, that’s an overall difference of 35 per cent in favour of municipal employees.

The high-water mark was reached in 2016, when municipal salaries and benefits were 42 per cent higher than the rest of the public sector. This number has come down thanks to a crucial law, sponsored by Liberal Minister Pierre Moreau, that forced municipal employees to share (gasp!) 50:50 in the cost of their pensions.

Moreau’s law saves Montreal hundreds of millions of dollars a year of pension contributions. But guess what? Salaries have been creeping up ever since — one suspects it’s to compensate the employees for having to contribute fairly to their own pensions. We are little further ahead.

Thanks to the present-day value of their defined-benefit indexed pensions alone, many Montreal employees will be millionaires the day they retire.

The City of Montreal racks up an average “global” remuneration of $106,000 for managers, professionals, white collars and blue collars. Montreal pays their employees “all in” an eyewatering 50 per cent more than their Quebec civil-servant equivalents and 43 per cent more than their private-sector doppelgangers — who have to work 1,725 hours a year. Municipal employees, on average, clock in a mere 1,546 hours.

I can’t be the only taxpayer on the Island of Montreal to find this differential in remuneration scandalous. What is more, while the private sector can lay off its workers, City of Montreal workers, like most public-sector workers, have job security for life.

Of course, the spread of such cushy pay packets throughout the Island of Montreal was an all-too predictable result of Montreal’s annexation of its on-island suburbs in 2002. A wage “harmonization” bonanza was unleashed when salaries of the employees of the former suburban cities were bumped up to match Montreal levels.

As the cost of remuneration can take up nearly one-half of the city’s budget, Montreal elected officials must grasp this nettle. They need to dump their parliamentary system, de-politicize themselves and realize their main purpose in life is to tax citizens and return that money in the form of efficient services. That is not a political act.

This means attracting seasoned administrators as elected officials. Right now, few Montreal councillors have the necessary experience to oversee a $7 billion organization. And lower taxes, better services and reasonably paid employees are not left-wing nor right-wing goals.

Peter F. Trent, a former inventor and businessman, served five terms as mayor of Westmount and led the Montreal demerger movement. His Merger Delusion was a finalist for the best Canadian political book of 2012.

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