Tories boosts pay of top bureaucrats

[Canadian]

The federal government has quietly handed senior government officials and the heads of Crown corporations pay raises and increased bonuses, sounding alarm bells from a tax watchdog and the biggest public service union.

Government executives and deputy ministers, the highest ranking public servants, are in line to get a 2.5-per-cent pay raise.

The chief executives of Crown corporations, such as the CBC and Canada Post, are slated to get three-per-cent raises.

The salary increases will be applied retroactively dating back to April.

Executives and deputy ministers will also receive a 1.1-per-cent increase to a scale of end-of-year bonuses which are tied to performance and objectives. Besides this payment, executives and deputy ministers are also eligible for another bonus on top of that of between three and five per cent if they earn all their basic bonus.

The raises are part of a strategy aimed at preventing high-level public servants from jumping to more lucrative positions in private enterprises.

There was no formal public announcement of the increases from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

"What troubles me is this is a government that was elected to ensure greater transparency, and they've decided to shelve a public announcement," said John Williamson, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

"It's not so much the pay raise that bothers me as the way it was quietly stated."

John Gordon, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said the salaries of senior government executives should face the same scrutiny as those of any other public servant.

"This is really a slap in the face to our members," he said. "Regardless of the amount of money (in the raises) they should be made public."

Gordon also called the quiet pay raise a "turnabout" for a government that campaigned on a platform of more transparency.

It is not the raises so much but the way they did it. Sneaky. I thought Harper was going to do things differently? I guess not.

Williamson said he wonders why the government decided to raise the amount of bonus pay senior executives receive, given the Tories' vociferous opposition to such moves when they were in opposition.

Because he is a Harpercrit.

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[The phantorino]

I suppose if you want to stop the erosion of upper-level governmental administrators to the private sector, you have to [pay them similarly to what they will get paid there. Where Harper comes from, though, is the richest province of all. A little skewed - It's like paying Geroy Simon as much as Terrell Owens one year in advance of the end of a contract to stop him going to the NFL - as if he could!