Mayoral candidates take pass on raise

Toronto mayoral candidates lined up on Monday night to insist that they had no interest in a proposal to hike their wage, should they be elected, by 9%, or about $16,000.

City staff are recommending that the mayor’s salary be bumped up from its current level of $167,769.94 to $183,604, plus $1,900.08 in added benefits, on Dec. 1, when David Miller’s replacement assumes office.

The recommendation will be considered by the city’s executive committee next week. It stems from a report by the Hay Group that found Toronto’s leader to be well below the city benchmark of setting salaries of elected officials at the 75th percentile, which means that 25% of politicians in large municipalities make more.

The Hay Group determined that the mayor’s salary increased at an average of 1.6% each year since 2006, compared with 4.25% in other Canadian municipalities, according to a report that cost the city $50,000 to produce.

If adopted, the raise will still put the future Toronto mayor below what Hazel McCallion, in Mississauga, currently makes ($185,137), what Gerald Tremblay, in Montreal, earns ($192,235) and the earnings of Durham and York Region’s chairs. (The latter three, higher-paid positions had not been included in previous evaluations.)

“The first test of leadership is leading by example – if elected I’ll flat-line the mayor’s salary for the whole four-year term,” said George Smitherman. “The jackasses who voted to commission this report in the first place should pay for the cost of the report or have it taken out of their hides.”

Rocco Rossi kicked off his run in January by pledging to cut his salary by 10%, freeze it for four years and trim the mayor’s office budget by the same amount. “They’re still not listening,” Mr. Rossi said on Monday. “I will have nothing to do with this increase and will repeal it if elected.”

Rob Ford has pledged to cut the mayor’s office budget by 20%, and on Monday said that “at a time when many employees haven’t received a cost-of-living increase in their wage, the last thing any politician should be doing is taking a raise,” he said. “If this proposal goes through and I become mayor then I will donate the increase to charity.”

Loath to make the mayor’s salary an issue in the race, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone said he would also freeze his salary at the 2010 level. “The mayor of Toronto gets paid less than four or five different mayors of the GTA even though the mayor represents more than 50% of population of the GTA,” he pointed out, but “I would rather we talk about Transit City, about environmental issues. I would rather we talk about building a cricket stadium.”

Sarah Thomson had earlier condemned the review as a waste of money, and said on Monday “the mayor should not be getting an increase in pay, nor should anyone else on council.” She has called for a pay freeze for the first year and a half.

Toronto city councillor salary of $99,620 was recorded in the 77.5 percentile of the market, so no increase was suggested. The Hay Group urged the city to come up with another way of establishing the compensation rate (it’s currently residents per councillor) that addresses Toronto’s “complexity.” City council adopted the 75 percentile principle following recommendations in two independent reports.