To the Editor,
At what point did public service morph into public profiteering?
From the highest to the lowest levels, those in government service have succumbed to a ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude.
Senators, not content with generous salary, housing, travel and pension benefits apparently feel entitled to game the system by using a very loose interpretation of the rules of the senate.
Meanwhile, rank and file public service workers, perhaps taking their cue from their political masters, feel free to strike for still more pay and benefits, regardless of the damage done to the ordinary taxpayer from whom they derive their livelihood.
Witness the foreign service employees who are on strike. A Level 2 foreign service worker earns $83,000 annually, as well as a ‘foreign service premium’ of $6,600 to $31,300 – not to mention a fully indexed, defined benefit pension plan and early retirement. Their complaint of course is that they make less than other government workers of similar skills, refusing to recognize that such salaries and benefits are neither fair nor sustainable to taxpayers.
Yet these coddled and protected workers are prepared to sacrifice the livelihoods of Canadian farmers who rely on temporary foreign workers to harvest their crops, as well as the hundreds of thousands who work in tourism related businesses who rely upon the issuance of visitors visas.
It’s time to de-unionize monopoly government workers, returning them to the professional status they purport to be.
Randy O’Donnell
Nanaimo