The pay and perks package for Calgary’s mayor comes in at a total amount of $256,938. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially for a guy who spends so much time just admiring himself. It looks even more generous when one compares it to the salary of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s in charge of the second largest country in the world, rather than just one city. Harper makes around $320,000 a year, about $60,000 more than the Calgary mayor.
The US president draws down US$400,000 plus various expenses and perks, but given that this is supposed to be the position of the most powerful man (or woman) in the world, carrying the weight of the world on his (her) shoulders, including fighting wars on behalf of countries too timid to take care of their own business and protecting the world from evil terrorists determined to blow the entire planet to kingdom come, it makes one wonder what the Calgary mayor has done to deserve a salary within a relatively close range of the US President’s paycheque.
The amount can be nuanced further if we factor in the population. As mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi is responsible for 1.1 million people. The mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, who makes a total of $202,222, answers to almost three million inhabitants (and being a conservative a left-wing city, he must also endure intrusions on his home and privacy as well as harassment by members of the left-wing media). Like him or hate him, Ford actually spends time in his city and works on the issues confronting the good people of Toronto, unlike Nenshi, who in his first year in office spent an exorbitant amount of time travelling to Toronto and elsewhere, and frequently for the sole purpose of allowing himself to be wined and dined and celebrated by left-wing elites in places far away from his home base in Calgary.
When Calgarians needed their mayor to do his job the most, that is, getting rid of the Occupy Calgary bums, he failed to live up to his duties, instead choosing to insult citizens via his Twitter account who had demanded swift action so as to prevent further damage and expenditure caused by the bums and their tents in downtown.
No, that would have been too easy. Mind you, the mayor didn’t have any qualms removing and arresting a pastor who had merely taken the mayor’s promise of turning City Hall into an open-door “living-room” at face value. As it turned out, only the mayor’s radical and extreme left-wing buddies were welcome at City Hall. The pastor’s mistake was twofold: he believed the mayor and he thought the mayor was serious about treating all comers equally. Well, the good pastor got his response from the mayor in the shape of a pair of shiny handcuffs (again, unlike the mayor’s personal and ideological buddies among the Occupy Calgary swamp people).
When public office becomes about pecuniary perks and prestige, rather than the people represented by such office, there’s a big problem that puts democracy itself at risk. The Calgary mayor serves as an excellent example of what public office shouldn’t be about. Obviously satisfied with the money he makes, he’s also become his own biggest fan and groupie, incessantly referring to himself as the “most popular politician” or “sexiest man” in town (according to women at his former college who have contacted this publication, they’d rather poke their eyes out than get anywhere near the “sexiest man” in town).
Like Barack Obama, this mindset places Nenshi on a very slippery slope, as it makes it more likely than not that he will follow his inner, and baser, instincts of putting his own interests above those of the people he’s supposed to represent – not necessarily deliberately; more like an uncontrollable knee-jerk or gut reaction that forces all narcissists to put themselves first.
As for the compensation issue, there are two ways of going about it. We can leave Nenshi’s pay where it is, but would have to increase Harper’s to an even million at least, and the US president’s to ten million, so as to achieve some kind of proportionality. Or we can leave the salaries of Harper and Obama intact and cut Nenshi’s in half (at the very least).
Unfortunately, neither scenario will come to pass, short of an actual revolution driven by the “villagers” and their “pitch-forks” like in the good old days.