NDP would demand MLAs cut salaries, pensions

The New Brunswick NDP is promising thatif it has any seats in a minority government after the Sept. 27 provincial election, it will demand MLAs reduce their pay and halve their pensions.

New Democratic Party Leader Roger Duguay held a news conference Wednesday promoting what he calledthe "20/50" bill.

The proposed bill would reduce MLA salaries by 20 per cent and restrict a number of their pension benefits.

It would eliminate supplementary pension allowances, eliminate bonus pensions paid to cabinet ministers and party leaders, and drastically reduce severance pay when MLAs quit or are not re-elected.

The NDP leader said those cuts would add up to a more than 50 per cent reduction from the current levels.

"The NDP believes that everyone, including MLAs, should have good pay and pensions, but Conservatives and Liberals have voted themselves a pay package for MLAs that is far too rich for middle-class families to accept," Duguay said Wednesday.

Two years ago, Liberal and Progressive Conservative MLAs voted to increase the value of their pensions by 85 per cent, which gave New Brunswick MLAs one of the richest pension plans in the country.

New Brunswick MLAs make a base salary of $85,000, which ranks seventh among the provinces. Duguay's cut would reduce the salary to $68,000, just above P.E.I., which offers the least compensation for provincial politicians.

Duguay said the bill will be an important part of the party's election campaign.

"The NDP is campaigning in the election on the need to balance the books to save our health and education system," he said.

"The 20/50 bill is a way to show that we are serious as a party about putting our money where our mouth is."

Posters, website part of campaign

The party also launched a poster campaign that shows Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward's mouth stuffed with fries, in a parody of the 2004 documentary Supersize Me, which was about a man who gorged himself on McDonald's meals.

The posters, which come in English and French versions, say, "He's lovin' it" and "Supersize my pension: you're paying for it."

An online petition is also part of the campaign.

The NDP has never won more than one seat in the province, and none of the promotional material suggests it can win the September election.

Instead, Duguay is saying that a seat or two in the legislature could give his party the balance of power.

The party's new website states that if there had been an NDP seat in the legislature in April 2008 when the Liberals and Conservatives voted unanimously to raise their salaries the bill could have been stopped.

There has not been an NDP in the legislature since 2005 when then leader, Elizabeth Weir, resigned to become the president and chief executive officer of Efficiency New Brunswick.

Duguay also said that any NDP members who are elected will be held to the standard of their proposed pay cuts, with the excess money going to charity.

Premier Shawn Graham said a judge reviewed the MLA pay scales and compared them to other provinces.

"It's critical that we have a remuneration system in place that's competitive with other jurisdictions, but that it's not set by elected officials, that's it's done independently of our office, and that's been done in the province of New Brunswick," he said.

Alward said he wasn't the Leader of the Opposition when the pension increase went through, though he was an MLA and he did vote for the increase.

He chose to see the attack ad as flattering.

"If they see the need to be attacking me as a person then their focus is not on defeating the Liberal government, but defeating myself and the P.C. party of New Brunswick as the next government," he said.