Great Recession Doesn’t Stop Canada’s Members Of Parliament From Pigging Out At The Public Trough

By Doug Draper

Are you a retired person out there trying to make ends meet on Canada’s ‘Old Age Security pension? And if you are, did you enjoy an increase of 10 per cent in your pension payments last year?

Canada's federal members of parliament and senators get piggish about pension hikes for themselves while many of the rest of us struggle to get by.

Of course not!

As a follow-up to a report Niagara At Large posted on this site on April 17 entitled; ‘Ontario Being Pushed To Improve Pensions For Seniors In Need’, it would be a gross oversight on NAL’s part not to point out that Canada’s federal government had no bones about rubber stamping a 10 per cent hike in pensions for MPs and our un-elected (should summarily have their jobs abolished) senators.

This “gold-plated pension fund,” as a recent story in The Toronto Star called it, has been approved in apparent total denial of the realities facing many of the rest of us out here who are struggling to recover from the worst recession that has rocked the economy this country and others since the Great Recession of the 1930s.

At what point, does Canada’s government totally lose site of the fact that while it is feathering the nest bed for federal politicians for their retirement future, people jobs have been lost out here to the tune of double-digit joblessness rates in Niagara and other regions of the country, and many of those who do have jobs or pensions are holding them with minimal raises and benefits to keep up with the soaring costs of food, fuel and other basic needs.

And what gives with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives? Didn’t they promise to come to Ottawa to clean the place of irresponsible spending and lighten the burden for the little guy?

Well, apparently that promise is history because while they have fattened MP’s pension funds (Harper, by the way, now stands to collected an annual pension, paid for by us, of $178,000), the spending cuts have come in the form of day-care services for low-income families, health-care payments to the provinces, little or no assistance to students struggling to pay for their college and university educations, and – of course – pensions.

 The increase in Canada Pension Plan benefits went up about half a percentage point this past January and the Old Age Security pension for people 65 years of age or older remains unchanged at $516.96 per month.

But Niagara MPs like Rick Dykstra, the Conservative MP for St. Catharines, and Rob Nicholson, the Niagara Falls MP for Niagara Falls and Harper’s Minister of Justice, don’t have to worry about that do they. They’ll continue to enjoy a good feed from the public trough long after they are out of public office.

Maybe someone ought to ask the justice minister where the justice is in a 10-per-cent pension hike for MPs and senators, and pennies for all those many Canadians (a good half of us) who aren’t fortunate enough to have a robust pension plan to pay into through their jobs?

Any maybe more of us ought to be outraged out here and showing it by flooding our MPs with phone calls and emails complaining about this. But how much of us are paying attention and how many are spending more time watching hockey finals and reading People magazine.

 I’ve got an old saying on my office wall; “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.”

Please weigh in on this one with your comments. And to our American neighbours, some of whom I know are following this site, feel free to express your own comments visa vi frustrations over entitlements to your elected representatives versus what the rest of us get.

(Click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)