CBC is reporting that Jamie Hachey, President of the Saint John Police Association, is extremely upset that the city is broke.
No, actually he is upset that the city may finally do something about their abysmal financial situation.
The City of Saint John is driving residents away. Maybe de-indexing pensions is better than bankruptcy, but Mr. Hachey does not seem to care how broke the city is, how shoddy the infrastructure is, or how many people leave the city to get away from runaway staffing costs inflating their tax bills and eating up city taxes that could be spent fixing roads.
Those who cannot afford to move to Quispamsis or Grand Bay will be left holding the bag in Saint John.
Like Fredericton to the north, many city employees have so little interest in supporting their city they will not even live in it. The union leadership in Saint John is blind to reality. The provincial government is not going to bail them out.
Saint John is a city in decline in search of leadership. Ivan Court is not it, and obviously the union leadership thinks there are still 90,000 people living in the city paying property taxes.
One of the stories I have loved is the repeated attempts of the union to meet with MLAs and their feigned outrage that the MLAs won't meet with them.
ReplyDeleteThis is a classic. The union want to meet with the MLAs because they want the MLAs to change to rules. In other words, rather than accept that their pension must be placed on a sound financial footing like oh everyone else'e pension, let's change the rules, so we can blame government later on (and demand they ante up) when our new rule-compliant pension goes bust.
Likewise all this talk about the province's "refusal to negotiate". Yes, the province is refusing to negotiate. Why? Because this isn't a negotiation. This is about the union and the management making decisions (finally) about making a pension which is not sustainable, sustainable - and that means more contributions (either from members or taxpayers in SJ) or fewer benefits - or both.
If they had done this years ago when the problem was first pointed out, they would have to take a lot less drastic measures now. But instead, they keep hoping for someone else to magically "solve" their problem - perhaps with a huge influx of new cash.
This of course is exactly the same failure-to-face-the-problem which has put our province's finances in such a serious hole.
To it's (baffling) credit, the TJ editorial board has consistently nailed this one on the head - even down to the issue of why the MLAs are quite properly refusing to meet with the unions to "negotiate". I am astounded, but I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.