The Nanaimo Daily News is doing a series looking for ways to save Nanaimo property taxpayers money. Today, they looked at the wage and benefit gap between the private sector and municipal government. From the article:

Statistics show a large difference in income between city employee earnings and average Nanaimo income. In 2012, 608 full-time equivalent city staff positions were paid $46.8 million in wages and taxable benefits, or approximately $76,430 per employee. By comparison, the average income in Nanaimo is $34,760, according to Statistics Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey. The average family income is $73,013.

Needless to say, Nanaimo should be looking to Penticton and Prince George to see what they have done to try and tackle labour costs (more on those cities here).

Nanaimo resident (and longtime CTF supporter) Casey Timmermans has already sent in a letter to the editor on this:

Your headline: ‘Clear disparity’ between public and municipal wages

What kind of imbalance can you expect when you have a virtual unionized labor monopoly in the public sector? The answer is not more of the same rhetoric (“oh it’s not fair, give me more”) that unions have used historically to flagellate their religion of envy for both politically and economic gain. This is certainly not representative of society’s social conscience.

We’ve suffered from this disease for century when the answer lies within all of us. If we continue to punish our most productive individuals with our tax system, society’s going to get less of what we need to solve the problem. So the question really is what kind of tax laws and regulations are required to encourage both increased investment behavior and incentivize productive employment behavior?

The answers do not lie with distribution of someone else’s wealth but lies with growing the economy so that the financial cost of supporting people unable to do so and necessary public services, becomes a smaller part of the entire economy because the percentage (over 30%) of the economy government takes today is simply not sustainable to achieve our goals. So a more productive discussion about public policy would be helpful rather than engendering emotions of envy within all of us, for political gain.

Hard to argue with Casey on this one.