The Chinese water torture consisted of tying down the victim, immobilizing his head, and driving him insane with slow drips of water on his forehead.
The journalist’s equivalent torture is the recurring story, with fill-in-the blanks different names, that drips on his forehead and dribbles onto the front pages or the newscast, with enough pause between drips that a fresh audience hopefully may be hoodwinked into believing it’s actually news.
And so we come to the startling revelation that the bureaucrats, municipal division, are screwing the populace.
The latest to marshal the figures on the higher bureaucracies’ pay is Dermod (a typographical error waiting to happen) Travis, executive director of IntegrityBC, which has Green Party roots.
Fair enough. Travis has done a public good by not only winkling out the salaries of top B.C. municipal bureaucrats but also dramatizing them to make them easily grasped by the furiously envious.
Here’s first-class fury-making: Jack Lew, U.S. President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff and highest-ranking White House employee, is paid $172,200 a year. If his job becomes vacant – probably due to his malnutrition – there are 116 municipal employees in B.C. plus 16 hired hands of TransLink who likely wouldn’t line up for his role, unless they eat prestige.
Using the Vancouver Sun’s database, Travis found that the charmed circle of bureaucrats, the municipal managers or chief administrative officers of 30 B.C. cities, earn – let’s make that “are paid” – more than the guy one office over from the president of the (still) most powerful nation on Earth.
Travis’ leading example is George Duncan, CAO of Richmond, at $267,613 in 2010-11. But the fattest feline is Penny Ballem, city manager of socialist Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Vancouver.
Travis cites Ballem’s salary as $324,110, nearly double Jack Lew’s piddling $172,200. But the champion on a per-citizen basis seems to be Lillooet’s CAO, weighing in at $120,316 for tending the affairs of just 2,322 citizens.
Take growth corpse West Vancouver. Its population has barely ticked up in this century. Yet David Marley of the Interested Taxpayers’ Action Committee and ITAC’s number-cruncher Garrett Polman say town hall staff that were paid $100,000-plus in 2006 have since enjoyed average raises of 7% annually, excluding benefits.
Here’s the plus ça change moment: 30 years ago B.C.’s then-health minister, Jim Nielsen, grouchily revealed that Richmond’s superintendent of schools was paid more, currency adjusted, than U.S. legendary super-snoop J. Edgar Hoover.
Delta Mayor Lois Jackson, in councillor days, bizarrely had to file a freedom of information request to get at the salaries of Delta’s own bureaucrats. But nothing changes. Why?
Logical conclusion:
The myth is that public servants are, well, servants. They aren’t. They’re the government’s government. Someone should stop them, but someone can’t. They get away with it because they can get away with it. They’re in charge, from powerful unions to a bureaucratic executive class. Politicians come and go, and anyway lack moral authority, not even worth voting for or against by, typically, 70% of eligible municipal voters.
The public fumes impotently. Don’t look for leadership to the editorial eunuchs of the media, careful choosers of targets and the drip of the Chinese water torture dulling their heard-it-all-before indignation. You all right with that?
Hold on. The contrarian case: Considering the screaming boredom and sterility of doing what no sensible human being would choose to do, are the mandarins maybe worth it? •
