Media Release for September 27, 2007

Stairs Presents Mock Cheques to McGuinty, Yakubuski to Highlight Wage Commitments

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RENFREW: Felicite Stairs today joined with campaign workers outside a discount store here to present large mock cheques made out to Dalton McGuinty for $40,000 and to Conservative MPP John Yakabuski for $22,000. These cheques, said Stairs, symbolize the “gifts” the MPPs gave themselves in voting for an MPPs' pay raise while resisting the NDP’s call for an immediate raise of the minimum wage to $10 per hour.

Stairs, the NDP provincial candidate in Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, said there is an unfair balance between MPPs’ salaries and those of Ontario’s working families.

“When today’s families have their financial resources stretched to the limit, the Liberals and the Conservatives made their priority raising their own salaries,” Stairs said. “Most households in Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke haven’t enjoyed any significant increases in their annual incomes in years. Dalton McGuinty’s annual raise is almost twice as much as the average woman in Renfrew County earns in a year – $21,000. The average man in the county earns $33,000. That’s why people are outraged.”

“He had the time and the money to throw away for himself and his friends, with MPP raises, slush funds, and private hospitals, yet he didn’t have the time to give a living wage to ordinary families that struggling just to get by.” The so-called slush funds, she says, were only part of $1.6 billion in provincial spending which were “rushed out the door in year-end spending”, for which the Auditor General criticized the McGuinty government. She also expressed outrage with the $2.4 million the government spent “in its legal fight to keep parents of autistic children from getting the therapy their kids needed.”

The minimum wage issue is particularly important now, said Stairs. “Ontario has lost approximately 200,000 well-paying industrial jobs during the McGuinty years. While many of the laid off workers have found other jobs, they rarely find jobs that pay nearly as well. Many find themselves working in the low-wage service sector without the protection of unions.” As a result, the minimum wage affects older workers as well as young people entering the work force.

Research released this week by Statistics Canada supports Stairs’ contention that Ontario has a “huge and increasing prosperity gap.” She says, “The rich are in fact getting richer, but the rest of us, the 80% of us who are not rich, are working harder, longer, either falling behind or just treading water, trying to keep their head above water.”

Stairs pointed to one man she met at the recent Renfrew County Ploughing Match. “He told me ‘Sure they created a lot of jobs. I've got three of them.’” Many people are forced to work more than one job just to make ends meet, she said.

The NDP, Stairs said, had a plan to protect workers’ incomes. “First of all, the minimum wage needs to be raised to $10 an hour, right now. Students and other young people need adequate incomes to handle the costs of education and starting families. We need to protect jobs by appointing an independent jobs commissioner and to create new green jobs in energy conservation and renewable resources. And the politicians’ pay increases need to be rolled back, rescinded, cancelled, and done away with. Politicians shouldn’t get any pay increases unless and until Ontario’s working families see their incomes raised first.”

“A ten dollar per hour minimum wage would be no cure-all, but it will help many families as they struggle to stay out of poverty,” she said. “They need it now, and it should be indexed to rise with inflation.”

Stairs said the mock cheques represent money that should have remained in the provincial treasury to work for the common good rather than self-interest. “The MPP pay raise shows how far out of touch with the reality of ordinary families the Liberal and Conservative are,” she said. “That’s why we say, in this campaign, that ALL our families, not just the privileged few, deserve a fair deal.”

Felicite Stairs and supporters demonstrate against MPPs’ salary raise. From left: Joyce Aiston, Dan McCarthy, Felicite Stairs, Judy McEwen, Anne Marie Aubert, Judith Sandles, Dan McEwen

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