Payette's plush pension is a royal ripoff
Governor general Julie Payette departs office, we learn, with a pension of about $150,000 a year, for life, for doing a job not very well, and for not very long.
She is 57 years old. It will sting, but do a little math. If she lives for another 30 years, that's $4.5 million. With indexing, of course, it would be a great deal more than that, but the point is made: this is a lifetime of financial security for an appointment that did not last three-and-a-half years (investiture Oct. 2, 2017).
And there are other “expenses” she is entitled to claim in perpetuity because — and don't be stupid now — former GGs can't be expected to buy their own pens, paper and printers for the deluge of fan mail.
I wonder sometimes if the problem with privileged people — and the rules made for them — is they know what money is, they just don't know what a dollar is worth.
Put another way, $150,000 is more than three times what my pension will be, and I've worked in one place for more than 40 years.
(On the other hand, I haven't been to outer space.)
Still, three grand a week is something, and way, way more than the average Canadian will have in their golden years, for a lifetime of toil — not hand-shaking but actual, grinding labour.
Pensions in the public sector have long been a source of envy and, with elected officials at least, there has been a reckoning of sorts.
Premier Mike Harris took a flame-thrower to MPP pensions in Ontario in the mid-1990s.
But not without some major cheque-writing. Upper Ottawa Valley MPP Sean Conway, for instance, was among five long-standing members who were handed $1-million buyouts. (“Embarrassing,” he called it, without argument.)
And getting rid of federal “pension pigs” was a high-profile theme from the Reform
Party, who termed MP pensions “obscene.” (Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney, however, left with six-figure ones, so obscenity does have its upside.)
But back to the governor general, who resigned last week after an Upstairs, Downstairs mutiny from many of the staff fed up with an intolerable working climate inside Rideau Hall.
Part of me feels sorry for the woman, an accomplished former astronaut. She was clearly ill-suited to the position from the moment of liftoff and, when turbulence hit in the early going, she proceeded to make things worse.
The chord just seemed off. The pandemic, surely, was a time when a sovereign could seize the moment and rally the bedraggled, like the Queen Mother during the blitz in a battered London. What was our GG doing when Canadian lives were being turned upside down, from coast to coast, for 10 months? Whatever it was publicly, hardly anybody noticed, while internally, her staff were miserable.
Her letter of resignation, too, was an embarrassment.
“Everyone has a right to a healthy and safe work environment, at all times and under all circumstances,” the message said. “It appears this was not always the case at the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General. Tensions have arisen at Rideau Hall over the past few months and for that, I am sorry.”
So, immediately there is this distancing, this, “Oh, it was over yonder” in the Office of the Secretary, far away from Her Majesty's eyes and a kind of “if only I'd known” reference later in the letter. I mean, wow.
You know what Canadians dislike more than privilege or arrogance? Dishonesty. For
Pete's sake, take ownership of the problem and admit your mistakes. Or better yet, fix them when they crop up. But don't brush them aside and pretend they're someone else's doing. You know, “heavy is the head” and all that blather.
Think of the Rod Phillips situation, the finance minister who detonated his cabinet job by flying
You know what Canadians dislike more than privilege or arrogance? Dishonesty.
to a Caribbean resort in the middle of a stay-home pandemic.
The “getting on the plane” was not the worst part, not the worse “error in judgment.” It was the deception. The images on social media of him by the crackling fire at Christmas when he was actually poolside in the sun. This is not an honest accounting.
Payette also exacerbated things by saying she believes in “natural justice, due process and the rule of law,” which suggests an “oh boy, if only you knew our side of the story” kind of defence, as though staff were just a bunch of whiny brats.
You work 40 months and get a pension for 30 years? Natural justice and due process? Honestly, spare us.