We should be shouting from the rooftops

New Brunswick MP Mike Dawson has announced he will be refusing to accept the annual pay raise given to all MPs — a roughly $9,000 salary increase to take effect on April 1 (no, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke). Canadian politicians are among the highest paid in the world.

And this isn’t a one-off. Every spring MPs get an obscene pay raise while the rest of us are struggling to get by. As Dawson stated: “It is frankly distasteful that Parliamentarians are set to receive a raise while the working man and woman in this country hasn’t seen a decent raise in decades.”

In one of his columns the late Rex Murphy wrote: “Einstein claimed that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. But Einstein never saw Canadian MPs when they decided to give themselves a raise.”

Fellow taxpayers — contact your local MP to demand a moratorium on automatic pay increases for members of Parliament for at least five years.

Pete Brouwer 

Diamond City, Alta.