Council votes itself a raise and calls it a benchmark

The review sets councillor pay against a comparator group of nine municipalities. Four of them have more than twice Sudbury's assessment base. One has a third of its geography. The group was not published until after the vote.

A benchmark is only a benchmark if the comparison set is chosen before anybody knows what it will produce. Choose it afterwards and you have not measured anything; you have gone looking for a number you already wanted and found nine reasons to keep it. Any consultant will tell you this, and the ones who do the work know exactly which municipalities move the average and in which direction.

There is a defensible case for paying councillors more. Sudbury is 3,200 square kilometres of ward work, most of it done at night, by people with day jobs, on files that take years to close. A council only affordable to the retired and the independently comfortable is a narrower council, and a narrower council makes worse decisions about housing and transit than one that contains someone who has recently had to take a bus.

Make that case out loud. It survives contact with a public meeting. Residents are not as reflexively hostile to municipal pay as councillors seem to believe — they are hostile to being handed a conclusion and told it is arithmetic.

The process compounds the problem. A remuneration review is commissioned by the body it pays, reviewed by the body it pays, and adopted by the body it pays, and the only defence against that arrangement is a comparator set chosen in the open. Remove that and there is nothing left but the assurance of the people receiving the money that the money is appropriate. Councillors would not accept such an assurance from a contractor. They should not expect residents to accept it from them.

What is not defensible is arriving at the number first. Publish the comparator group before the next review, not after, and let residents argue with the arithmetic while it can still change.