Fournier restarts the debate on the salary of elected officials and is fine with the CAQ

Photo Simon Clark
The liberal party leader Jean-Marc Fournier

Charles Lecavalier

On Tuesday 16 January 2018 15:30

UPDATE
On Tuesday 16 January 2018 15:32

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The liberal party leader Jean-Marc Fournier wishes to relaunch the debate on the salaries of elected officials and a fine after he criticized the CAQ, which proposed the same thing.

“A declaration of the end of the session has led me to be attributed to the QAF, the desire to raise the salary of mps. As the recognized some of their members, this wage increase was only to neutralize the tax effects of a federal decision. I should have been more specific and less incisive”, he wrote in a letter sent to all members.

He will return on the output done in December where he claimed that “the people of the CAQ to the Office of the national Assembly [BAN] had agreed to increase wages”, and that they had, according to him, “a double language”.

In fact, members of parliament proposed an increase in salary of elected representatives from 5000 to 10 000 $ to compensate for the future taxation of their allowances by the federal government.

This attack had forced his liberal colleague François Ouimet, vice-president of the national Assembly and the president of the commission of the terms of work of deputies, to hold a rare press conference to “clarify the facts”. The elected liberal Patrick Huot, who serves on the committee, had also supported the project.

An independent committee

To address this thorny problem, Mr. Fournier is now proposing to “legislate for the last time, by creating an independent compensation committee with enforcement powers”. This committee, of which the president would be chosen by a two-thirds vote in the national Assembly, would become the sole responsible for the salary of the deputies.

It considers that the current situation is not tenable, because “the proposal of the BAN, based on a process of soliciting members of parliament, who was going to lead to a perception of conflict of interest”, the concern.

Mr. Fournier said however in December that he did not intend to legislate. He has now changed his mind and personally feel that, even if many liberals in the caucus were prepared to suffer a decrease of wages due to a tax change, the federal government, it would cause “a certain devaluation of our role as elected and [address] not the issue”.

Mr. Fournier had filed in 2015, a bill inspired by the relationship L’heureux-Dubé on the remuneration of deputies. His piece of legislation, which proposed a salary increase of 90 850 140 017 $ in consideration of the disappearance of a allowance non-taxable, and an increase of contribution to the pension plan, however, has been rejected by the opposition and was never adopted.