First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 6:30 p.m. ET (and 9:30 a.m. on Saturdays), sign up here.
TOP STORY
As federal public servants begin blocking roads and ports in a bid to get the government’s attention, a new survey is showing that most Canadians think government workers, in general, are paid just fine.
A new Angus Reid Institute survey finds that 64 per cent of Canadians either think government workers are overpaid (28 per cent) or “fairly compensated” (36 per cent).
Just 17 per cent thought they deserved a pay raise.
Unsurprisingly, the poll showed a pretty definitive partisan split: 33 per cent of NDP voters thought civil servants were underpaid, against just eight per cent of Conservatives.
This adds to an earlier Angus Reid poll finding that while Canadians broadly supported some of the aims of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) strike, they were less sympathetic when it came to the union’s demand for a yearly 4.5 per cent pay raise for three years.
While 65 per cent of respondents supported PSAC demands related to better overtime pay, only 48 per cent gave a thumbs up to the wage increase requested by the union.
The average federal government employee does indeed make well beyond the Canadian average, but this is not necessarily representative of the approximately 155,000 employees in the current walkout.
According to recent figures from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the average annual compensation for a full-time employee of the Canadian government is $125,300. This figure includes all costs in addition to salary, such as health benefits and pension contributions.
There are about 50,000 Canada Revenue Agency employees among the strikers, and the same PBO report found that the average CRA salary is about $76,874.
It’s harder to get a rough estimate of pay among the other 100,000 strikers, as they comprise units that are known to be at the lower end of federal payrolls. This includes cleaners and Canada’s last remaining lightkeepers.
However, the Fraser Institute publishes a regular report that compares public sector wages to the private sector by tabulating numbers from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey.
Their latest count, released just before the start of the PSAC strike, found that the typical government employee is earning 8.5 per cent more as compared to someone performing similar work in the private sector (although the premium drops to 5.5 per cent if the private sector worker is in a union).
The most recent Statistics Canada numbers peg average hourly pay in Canada at $31.96, which works out to $66,476 per year.
PSAC began their walkout on April 19, but after one week of no movement from the federal government they escalated on Wednesday to blockading federal infrastructure, including ports and military bases.
“We shut down the Port of Montreal and downtown boulevards, the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Saint John’s; we blockaded the Treasury Board office in Ottawa and other strategic locations from coast to coast,” wrote PSAC in a Wednesday statement.
On Thursday, the union bussed 500 members to the departures lounge of Toronto Pearson International Airport, prompting airport officials to advise travellers to arrive early to account for anticipated delays caused by the disruptions.
The federal government has refused to budge on PSAC’s wage demands, sticking to their counter-offer of a three per cent raise each year for three years. But an emerging sticking point is the union’s demand that work-from-home measures be encoded into a new collective agreement.
Telecommuting has never previously been a particularly contentious point for Canadian organized labour, but PSAC is reacting to recent federal directives reversing nearly two years of stay-at-home orders.
“I’d rather be working from home” and “Telework Works” were among the signs held by picketers at a Wednesday demonstration on Parliament Hill.
IN OTHER NEWS
Canada’s Sudanese evacuation has begun, albeit later than almost any of our peer countries (and after more than a hundred Canadians have already left the country by begging off rides from nations with more functional militaries). Two flights departed Khartoum airport on Thursday, one carrying 45 passengers, while the second carried 73. This is a far lighter passenger load than almost any other evacuation flight out of the country. Given that the aircraft used are CC-130 Hercules transport planes, that first flight would have been nearly half empty. Long before Canada was able to get aircraft into Khartoum, there were reports that Global Affairs was having trouble coordinating with the roughly 600 Canadian nationals known to be in the country.
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Before Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and CBC President Catherine Tait got into a public spat over the issue of the broadcaster’s public funding, Tait had apparently suggested that they meet in person. Letters obtained by the investigative news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter show that Poilievre had only just won the Conservative leadership before Tait sent him a not tremendously polite letter offering to discuss the “implications” of his promise to defund the CBC (the letter also slammed Conservatives for disparaging the network’s report). Poilievre ignored the request, and a few months later Tait accused him of cynically bashing the CBC in order to gin up fundraising dollars.
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Amid flagging law enforcement recruitment numbers, the Ontario government is dropping a requirement for police candidates to have a post-secondary degree. In the words of Solicitor General Michael Kerzner, “I don’t think bringing an arts degree is necessarily the criteria to go to Ontario Police College and to be a cadet.” On the one hand, it’s not great optics that the government is dropping the qualifications required to become a police officer amid several high-profile examples of Ontario police officers flamboyantly breaking the law. On the other hand, the Canadian job market has been pretty badly plagued by degree inflation for quite some time.
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And a semi-regular reminder that one of Canada’s most cutthroat, hyper-capitalist investment entities happens to be a pension fund for teachers. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan just shut down its five-person Hong Kong unit with the intention of shifting their operations to the 50-person Singapore unit. The fund has an incredible $250 billion in assets with offices on every continent save Antarctica.
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