Ever wonder how much your reeve or councillor makes? Need some ideas on what to ask a candidate during the municipal election? If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, two new tools released by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) may just be of interest.

The first tool is called a “Voter’s Contract.” It’s a document that voters can print off our web site – www.VotersContract.ca - and whip out when a candidate knocks on their door during the municipal election this fall.
Voters can then ask candidates to put their initials beside up to five initiatives on the ‘contract’ that they would agree to pursue before simply hiking property taxes.

For example, one of the initiatives candidates could agree to pursue would be to ensure that local staff salaries aren’t out of line with similar positions in the private sector. After all, it’s a well-known fact of life that government employees often have higher salaries and pension benefits than similar positions in the private sector. Why should your property taxes go up in order to continue to support such a wage gap?

Another initiative candidates could agree to support would be to hold more referendums.  After all, since our democratic system was set-up decades ago, there have been great advances in transportation and communication. It’s much easier now for citizens to pay attention to issues and pop by a voting station every once in a while to voice their opinion on large spending decisions.

Engaging citizens more often in spending decisions would certainly help cut back on politicians’ legacy projects and initiatives that don’t have the support of the majority.

Other initiatives that candidates could agree to explore include; contracting out services to the private sector, exploring partnerships for capital projects and determining unused and unneeded land and assets that could be sold.

If you’re a really eager voter, you may even consider tracking a candidate down at their campaign office or on the campaign trail to see what they would support.

The other initiative that we recently undertook was to collect the salary information for municipal politicians across the province. It was an immense project, but we managed to collect 99 per cent of the data province-wide and have posted it on our web site – www.Taxpayer.com.

Yes, without your leaving your home, you can review the pay levels of municipal politicians across the province with just the click of a mouse. Each response we received from municipalities was scanned and placed online for voters to view.

After releasing the data to the media, many reporters asked us ‘who is paid too much or too little.’ However, that was not the intent of the project. With almost 200 municipalities in the province, it’s impossible for anyone to arbitrarily decide what politicians in other communities should be paid – that’s for local taxpayers to decide.

Our role, as a non-profit government watchdog agency, is to try and shine a light on what’s going on and to help taxpayers keep their elected officials accountable. The two new tools we developed should help you do just that.