Premier Dalton McGuinty is defending his $1,500-a-day cost-cutting czar as the Progressive Conservatives dial up the pressure for a mandatory public sector wage freeze.The money paid to former TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond is “eight times the pay of an average worker in this province and nearly 20 times the pay of somebody is making minimum wage,” NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Monday.
In London, Ont., McGuinty said in this period of slow economic growth it’s important to get “solid and wise advice on how we can manage government costs.”
“We need to find a way to get better value for our tax dollars,” he added after visiting a local business in the city, where his Liberals lost two seats in the Oct. 6 election.
Horwath said she fears Ontario’s most vulnerable citizens will bear the brunt of cuts that Drummond will recommend in his report due in January.
“Why is it that the only people being asked to make sacrifices are those who can least afford them right now?”
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said Drummond — whose report will advise both specific cuts and guiding principles for the government as it tackles a $16 billion deficit — is providing good value, so his fee is “money well spent.”
Drummond, also a former top official in the federal finance ministry, is limited to billing for a maximum of 100 days, meaning he could earn $150,000 for the project — which has a total budget of $420,000, finance ministry officials said.
Three others working with Drummond are earning $900 a day for a maximum of 100 days but turning the money back to their public-sector employers, the officials added, insisting the cost of the Drummond commission is tiny compared with the province’s $128 billion annual budget.
Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said “it’s awfully expensive for a job you think cabinet ministers and the premier would normally be doing.”
Hudak said he would offer advice “for free” and urge the government to freeze wages for more than 1 million public servants, both in unions and management.
His deputy leader, Christine Elliott, a lawyer and MPP for Whitby—Oshawa, said the Liberals are wrong in saying legal precedents under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms make it impossible to impose a public-sector wage freeze.
Noting the government already imposed a freeze on non-unionized staff, she pointed to a Charter mechanism that allows governments to override the “freedom of association” under “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified.”
It has been argued in recent cases that wage freezes infringe on the freedom of association because the freezes “interrupt” the collective bargaining process.
A freeze, which the Conservatives argue could save $2 billion a year, can be justified because in a financial sense the province “is in a really tough spot right now,” Elliott said.
The real reason Liberals are balking at a mandatory wage freeze for unionized public-sector workers — now under a voluntary freeze that has produced mixed results — is they don’t want to offend teacher and other unions in the Working Families Coalition that has funded anti-Conservative attack ads in the last three elections, she added.
“I think they’re (the Liberals) in a bit of a box right now.”
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Source: Toronto Star
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