By William Corden
A recent revelation about salary levels paid at Vancouver City Hall has shone a scialytic light on the unfettered compensation packages that some of these City Administrators get paid.
We find out that the Chief Administrative Officer for the City of Vancouver makes over Can $700,000 per year which is more than the Premier of the Province and the Prime Minister of Canada make COMBINED!It is a stunning weakness in the system for setting salary levels in both the Civic environment and the Crown Corporation club where councils and Ministries have been snowed by Consultants for years and years, management consultants who are hired to do job compensation reviews.
The consultants are in conflict right from the start because…… they’ll get fired if they don’t come up with the right recommendations.
Basically these “talent experts” are hired not by the councils or the ministries but by the very people who stand to benefit. We had an example here some years back where the Chief Officer of our Ferry Corporation (which at the time was a “Public, Private Partnership”, a joke in itself) did a classic carpetbagging job.
Didn’t he hire a consultant, only months after he took the job, to look at his salary level because he thought he wasn’t getting paid enough, the consultants were paid handsomely for their research and guess what?
They reported that he was almost insultingly underpaid, comparing his responsibilities to Corporations like Coca Cola and G.E. and so recommended that his salary be doubled which it was, because he had the authority to do it.
Then he had to hire an assistant who came in at his old salary. And he forgot to mention to the board of the ferry corporation that he was still getting money from his previous employer, a bankrupt airline company.
So the long and short of it is that these government and quasi government executive positions have virtually unchallenged authority to set their own pay levels, bad enough in itself but it has a knock on effect right down through the organisations, so you end up with departmental supervisors pulling down over $120,000 a year for a job that paid just $85,000 a couple of years ago.
This all feeds into the inflationary spiral because the organisations have to fund the increased salaries with increased fees and taxes. In Vancouver my property taxes have gone up by 100% in the last ten years and community center user fees are routinely increased at twice the level of inflation, they just pick figures out of the air and don’t care about protests. I cite Vancouver but I’m sure that it’s the same in every city in North America , not just Canada.
There’s no way but up as far as I can see unless somebody figures out a way to undercut them. One thing I know for sure is that if the CAO job in Vancouver was advertised at just, say, $200,000 there would be a line up around the block of people qualified to do the job and people prepared to do it at the advertised rate.
But, as they say … good luck with that idea.
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4 Responses
According to Elizabeth Nickson’s substack, Absurdistan, Vancouver was wrecked by the Greens and is now controlled by the Chinese criminal gangs. Home prices have increased hugely due to money-laundering of gambling and drug profits.
Well, to be fair Carl, it’s not really controlled by the Chinese gangs. We don’t get much on the nightly local news about gang activities because gangs are born from poverty and most of the Chinese immigrants are either super rich or their kids are holding down very high paying jobs.
You see, they study and have a culture of work.
In my experience they keep themselves to themselves, you never see an Asian in those tent cities downtown. You never see an Asian panhandling on the street, they seem to sort out their own problems within their own communities.
However this city has always been ground zero for feminism and a mecca for lefty greens and they’re the ones who have the tightest grip on the culture here. You can’t build an inch of roadway or drop a piece of orange peel in the woods without them coming out in protest.
You have to be careful to measure every loaded word you use in conversations otherwise they go off the deep end. The influence is so powerful that it’s now almost mandatory to have a woman in the top job in any elite organization.
Two main factors fuel this ridiculous state of affairs;
1. The student protesters are invariably the beneficiaries of the wealth their parents have accidentally accumulated due to the increase in price of their homes.
They don’t need to worry about getting a decent paying job, they don’t have any ambition for the future ‘cos there’s a pot of gold waiting for them when, as they say in the local vernacular, their parents croak.
They pursue useless degrees at the Universities here, things like “Women’s Studies” or “Native Indian studies ” or Medieval history and end up working for Starbucks.
Most families from the 70’s had a maximum of 2 kids so they’re going to get a million bucks apiece give or take….
Where’s the incentive to work , study and make a meaningful contribution?
These kids are just low hanging fruit for the lefties and greens who indoctrinate the entire upcoming society with their climate change catastrophe screechings and their gender fluidity rantings. The city is carpeted with a moss of these opinions.
2. Vancouver is one of the few places in Canada that you don’t have to suffer through snow bound, icy winters.
Yes we get a lot of rain but it’s much more attractive to live in this climate than anywhere else in blizzard country.
So they come in droves, the first thing they do when they get Mom and Dad’s inheritance is sell up and go west.
I live in an area where homes are on the market all the time and they sell in a couple of days from listing.
Overwhelmingly the buyers are mid-forties Canadians, white or mixed race, and a house costing over $2million doesn’t seem to faze them at all. (and I do talk to quite a few of them as I like to visit the open houses.)
It seems to me that the only properties that interest the gangs are the ones that are out of reach of the day to day buyers. The gangs fuel the Xanadu type homes in the upscale neighborhoods where $10 or $20 million is loose change.
At the lower end of society here we do have an insidious drug problem but that problem is exacerbated by the lefties who run the programs who want to give them a free supply and refuse to deal with the crimes committed by the users.
Overall though, compared to other cities I’ve lived in, it’s a great place to live and most things work quite well.
In any society 3% of the misfits cause trouble for the other 97%.
Thanks for the interesting response.
still not as much as the CAO of Vancouver
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13540257/anthony-albanese-pay-rise.html