MLAs' tax-free meal allowance tip of the iceberg

Ida Chong is the one we’ve all been talking about, but this meal-allowance business is much bigger than the $6,000 per-diem Chong claimed in the last fiscal year.

I can feel it in the public reaction. Like me, people see the Chong story as symbolizing much more than just one politician’s per-diem spending.

There’s real outrage and betrayal in the letters to the editor and on the radio call-in shows. Genuine hurt. It’s a shame that MLAs have reacted by circling the wagons and closing ranks, because this is an important moment to try to understand.

I’ve been surprised at my own wounded reaction, especially after learning this week that MLAs don’t even have to submit receipts for the $61 per diem they’re eligible for when doing official government work in Victoria or Vancouver. (“It costs more to administer the receipting process than to just set a flat rate,” said a communications spokesman with the Finance Ministry.)

Call me naive, but I had no idea.

Sure, I’m all for reimbursing our hard-working MLAs for legitimate expenses they incur. I know they’re putting in long hours and sacrificing family time, and all those other things that hard-working people everywhere can relate to.

But just handing them a wad of cash so they can eat, park and sleep at the taxpayers’ expense raises questions for me, and not just in an eye-rolling, cynical-about-politics kind of way. Before government started cutting vital public services last year, did anybody even consider steps to reduce these kinds of expenditures?

I browsed the government Web site for more information on the Capital City allowance that landed Chong in the news, and quickly found myself in a labyrinth of per-diems and meeting payments I hadn’t known existed.

The same arrangement that MLAs have is available to certain classes of civil servants. They get $47 a day, and $61 if their work on a particular day involves hanging out with an MLA or senior bureaucrats getting the higher rate.

Whether anyone actually spends the money on food is entirely up to them. It’s really just a non-taxable bonus on top of a (generous) salary.

The thousands of non-government people who sit on the province’s many advisory boards, tribunals and review panels can also claim meal per-diems. But I doubt many of them bother, seeing as the real money is in attending meetings, most of which pay from $350 to $750 per meeting.

I can’t tell you what all the costs would add up to, because nothing is gathered in one place. I sense from the government’s own slow response to my query for more information on this subject that they’d be hard-pressed to tell you, either.

But clearly it’s a potful.

Consider this one small example:  We paid almost $800,000 in the last fiscal year for 268 British Columbians to attend meetings of B.C.’s 75 Property Assessment Review panels.  Some panel appointees made as much as $10,000 from the meetings, held Feb. 1 to March 15 every year for unhappy homeowners wanting to appeal their provincial assessments.

And that’s just one small for-instance. Land yourself on any of the big government-appointed boards in B.C. and you’ll get $750 every time you go to a meeting.

That’s the price of doing business, some would argue. But during a recession like this one, no stone should go unturned when government is looking for savings.

Were these expenses scrutinized and considered for reduction? Were MLAs approached to reduce their own claims on public money?

One less meeting of Property Assessment Review panels would save a bundle - maybe even enough to spare a high-school-upgrade program for young moms. MLAs who were conscious of their spending and claimed only for what they spent could have made a real impact on community services that have now been lost.

Government has felt the pain of the recession, of course. Travel spending was cut in half in the past year, to $39 million, and office expenses were cut by a third. It’s been hard times for civil servants working in ministries singled out for layoffs, and for staff and clients of increasingly starved public services.

But the per-diem claims suggest that at the political level, it was business as usual. The MLAs took what the rules allowed them to take. The paid meetings continued unabated. A typical front-line community worker would have to work more than five days to earn what some people get paid just for a half-day meeting.

It’s a grave betrayal of the public trust, and profoundly unsettling for what it reveals about how our government views us. Serfs, let ‘em hear you roar.

A good read from Paul Willcocks on the Capital City allowance paid to MLAs, with no receipts required.

And here's the other end of the spectrum - a teen reading program becomes the latest victim of budget cuts.

Chong's food bill tough to swallow

Tough economic times are a particularly sensitive time to be learning that our political leaders think  belt-tightening doesn’t apply to them.

Admittedly, news of elected officials pushing the limits on how much of the public dollar they’re spending on themselves is unsettling at the best of times.

But when a province is in the midst of wiping out services and supports for people who really, really need them, it is truly offensive to hear about things like Ida Chong making full use of her publicly funded meal plan.   

We paid for $6,000 worth of restaurant eating for the Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA last year.   Chong was within her rights to claim it, mind you; legislature rules allow even local MLAs to charge up to $61 a day for restaurant meals while on the job in Victoria.

But would you do it? If services and supports were crashing all around you during a terrible economic year and it was your job to set things right, would you feel comfortable claiming $6,000 in restaurant tabs?

Not to put too dramatic a point on it, but little children suffered in B.C. so that Ida Chong could avoid packing a bagged lunch.

Her restaurant bill was equivalent to almost five months of full-time work for somebody earning minimum wage, which pays per eight-hour day roughly what MLAs are eligible to claim for a day’s eating. You could subsidize daycare for three school-age kids for a year on the public money Chong spent in restaurants in 2009.

What mental health and addiction programs lost funding while Chong and our other MLAs dined out? How many long-standing community services closed their doors so our provincial politicians wouldn’t have to feel the pinch in their own work lives?

Chong is simply the latest politician to have caught the media’s fleeting eye. She isn’t the first and won’t be the last who has taken what was on offer as a right.

But she certainly owes more of an explanation to her constituents than just her comments this week defending her level of spending due to “no meals or things like that provided for” in much of the work she does for government.

Out here in the real world, there aren’t many meals provided, either. We mostly have to pay our own way. I doubt many of us spend anything like $61 a day on restaurant food, probably because spending money like that becomes a lot less appealing when it comes out of your own wallet.

Why did Chong choose to spend so much when she knew full well that so many services her government funded were being sacrificed? I hope she’s reflecting on that right now.  But I also wonder why the premier didn’t just put expense rules like that on hold in the first place, when it became clear that B.C. needed to buckle down.

Not every politician dined out to excess, of course. Saanich-Gulf Islands MLA Murray Coell, spent a comparatively modest $1,321 on restaurant meals last year. And it goes without saying that being a politician is hard work, requiring frequent travel and quite a lot of restaurant dining.

But if Gordon Campbell is the leader of B.C., then surely he knows that leading by example is a cardinal rule. Yet what kind of example is it when government pays its cabinet ministers $152,000 - more than double the median household income in B.C. - and they still rack up another $6,000 on restaurant meals?

(Interesting fact: Chong’s salary and food expenses combined would cover 52 rent supplements of $250 for a whole year. It would keep 22 people on income assistance.)

I do know enough about budgets to recognize that Ida Chong eating out less often wouldn’t necessarily translate into more money for public services. Every pocket of funding has its own line on the budget. Money doesn’t readily flow even within programs, let alone between different ministries or from the political level to the squeezed community services below.

But Campbell’s government could change that tomorrow if they wanted to. MLAs could be told to make a real effort to reduce expenses, and savings could be channelled directly into struggling services.  Wouldn’t that be a good-news story?

Instead we’re reading about Chong’s eating habits and feeling betrayed again. It’s like catching your parents gulping down steak and lobster in the shed while the kids huddle in the kitchen eating gruel.

 Come on, you guys. B.C. is hurting, and it’s a real drag to find out that our political leaders aren’t sharing the pain. Pack a lunch.

A disturbing link to a site that lets you put the giant BP oil disaster into the context of your own back yard. Try moving the spill to Victoria, B.C. - terrifying.

Here's  a thoughtful piece from today's Vancouver Sun opinion pages that points out the folly of our federal and provincial governments when it comes to improving the health of their citizens.