Bill 202 Legislative Assembly (Transition Allowance) Amendment Act, 2011

March 7, 2011

Mr. Anderson: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s an honour to stand in this Assembly and move second reading of Bill 202, the Legislative Assembly (Transition Allowance) Amendment Act, 2011.

Mr. Speaker, before speaking to what this bill is about, I’d like to first speak to what it is not about. This bill is not meant to be any kind of attack on the integrity or worth of members in this House. Despite my often serious disagreements over policy issues with different members of this Legislature, especially those across the way, I have the highest respect for anyone who is willing to sacrifice years of their life to serve the public. I know how hard everyone in this House works. I know the financial sacrifices many of us have made to do this work. I know that it’s often a thankless job. I know that we are often unjustly accused and that expectations on our time are often impossible to fulfill, and then the time that we do commit is generally unrecognized or grossly understated. I know that the time away from loved ones is an on-going painful sacrifice and a constant balancing act.

My purpose in this bill is not to criticize or undervalue the members of this House, their service, or their worth to this province. My purpose is to do the opposite. The purpose of this bill, in part, is to help restore the reputation of this House and its members, which has, whether we care to admit it or not, been tarnished by the perception, and much of it is justified, that provincial politicians are filling their pockets with cash while our province is mired in the worst string of deficits in recent history.

A 34 per cent increase to cabinet salaries behind closed doors only worsened what was already a disdain for politicians setting their own generous salaries and benefits. This is seen after every election cycle as retiring MLAs walk away with severance pack-ages that look more like a winning lottery ticket than severance packages to the average Albertan. And every time it happens, Albertans shake their heads in collective disgust and disappointment. Talk to anyone outside the walls of this Legislature about these salary hikes and severances, and they will roll their eyes and they’ll sigh loudly and they’ll have a look of unsurprised but still very serious disappointment.

My fellow members, we need to do better than this. We need to set an example of integrity and frugality and fairness. When Albertans look at us, they need to have confidence stemming from our actions and not just our rhetoric that we perceive ourselves as the servants of the people of this province rather than politicians who feel that the people of Alberta are there to financially serve us. Albertans are craving this kind of leadership. They want to believe the best about the intentions, the integrity, and desires of those serving in this House, their leaders, but we need to give them a reason for feeling thus.

Bill 202 is by no means a silver bullet in strengthening public confidence in this Legislature or in its members, but it is a start, and it’s a large one at that. Bill 202 is simple and straightforward. It would lower the formula for MLA transition allowances by two-thirds on a go-forward basis. This means that on the day this bill is passed, if passed, MLAs will earn one month of salary for every one year served up to a maximum of 12 months’ salary for 12 years of service. All severance earned by MLAs under the current formula of three months for every year served will be respected and paid out upon the retirement of a currently serving member of this Legislature, but the new, more modest formula would apply for any time served by an MLA after the passage of this bill until the time they retire or are replaced by voters.

The amount of one month for every year served to a maximum of 12 months is much more in line with private sector severance packages as seen in case law. It is still on the generous side, in my opinion, but it is within reason. It is within the ballpark, as they say. It will give a departing MLA some funds to live on while they transition to a new job, if they so choose. This is what transition and severance packages are for. They are meant to help newly out-of-work former employees pay the bills while they find another job or secure another source of income. They are not meant, nor should they be, to act as a generous pension fund or, even worse, a winning lottery ticket.

I will not recite the large amounts of severance due to members of this House upon their retirement nor the circumstances sur-rounding the passing of the current severance formula. This would be counterproductive at this point. I’m here to look forward to the future. 2011 is not 2001. We live in a different time with much different challenges. The world’s economic future and, most un-settling, the economic future of our greatest economic ally, the United States, is entirely unsure. Although our provincial and national economies have been sheltered from the worst of the world economic downturn due to our vast natural resources, we have not been entirely immune, obviously. The days of $7 billion surpluses have been replaced with $7 billion cash shortfalls due to exasperating overspending and a slowdown in provincial revenue growth.

The two most recent record deficits of Budget 2010 and, as announced last week, Budget 2011 will result in almost the entire depletion of our province’s savings fund. We must correct our financial course, and we must do so soon, or we shall risk a return to annual debt financing, tax increases, or steep cuts to core social programs. We run the risk of squandering our province’s highest income-earning years because we were unable to restrain our-selves from overgorging on all-you-can-eat spending buffets rather than prudently planning and saving for our and our children’s uncertain economic futures.

Will Bill 202 balance the budget? No, it won’t, not by a long shot by any means. But it will change the tone. It will show leadership. It will show a willingness by the leadership of this province to cut back on that which is unnecessarily generous. It is an opportunity to lead by example.

How can we expect our hard-working public servants in Health, Education, as well as others to agree to have their salaries indexed to the cost of living, for example, or roughly 2 to 3 per cent per year, when MLAs have their salaries indexed to the average week-ly wage index, which is constantly more generous and, even worse, raise their salaries 34 per cent behind closed doors? It’s not fair to ask anybody to cut back in the public service if we’re un-willing to show an example ourselves.

So it is with all benefits. Why should the public service lower their hopes for more lucrative and expensive benefits packages when MLAs are walking away with severance packages in the high six or even seven figures? The answer is that we as a government and as a House have no right to ask them to moderate their expectations until we have shown by our actions that we are willing to moderate our own. Perhaps the abhorrent severance packages paid out by this government to individuals such as Dr. Duckett and Jack Davis or Paddy Meade and many others are products of the poor example that we have set.

My fellow members, we are the elected representatives of the people of our great and unique communities, the face of our great province. We must act like it. We must act above all reproach.

When I was first elected, one of my favourite MLAs, one of the greatest gentlemen and statesmen of this Assembly, the hon. Member for Calgary-Nose Hill, gave me this short poem, which I would like to share. The author was a man named Andrew Oliver, who lived from 1706 to 1774 and was a British Loyalist in America during the lead-up to the American Revolution. His poem was entitled Politics. It reads thus:

Politics is the most hazardous of all professions. There is not another in which a man can hope to do so much good to his fellow creatures, neither is there any in which by a mere loss of nerve he may do such widespread harm; nor is there another in which he may so easily lose his . . . soul, nor is there another in which a positive and strict veracity is so difficult. But danger is the inseparable companion of honour. With all the temptations and degradations that beset it, politics is still the noblest career any man [or woman] can choose.

May we in this House live up to this idealism. May we help restore the nobility of our profession in the eyes of Albertans. Passing Bill 202 will work slowly towards this goal, and I ask every member of this House to support it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.