A central figure in a government, the chief of staff of a prime minister is both his alter ego, his guardian angel and his henchman.
In their time, René Lévesque and Jean-Roch Boivin, Robert Bourassa and Mario Bertrand, Jacques Parizeau and Jean Royer, Pauline Marois and Nicole Stafford formed memorable couples, but the symbiosis between François Legault and Martin Koskinen is rarely seen.
The two men met at the Youth Summit in 2000 and they never left each other. Mr. Legault repeats to anyone who will listen that he would never have become Prime Minister without him. He also entrusts him with unusual tasks for a chief of staff.
Not only does Mr. Koskinen have a say in all major decisions, but he also gives interviews in place of the Prime Minister and is now responsible for rebuffing columnists deemed too complacent towards his adversaries.
One can very well understand that he is grateful to him. Moreover, no one contests his competence, which makes him a top gun in his profession, but why should the taxpayers finance the recognition of the prime minister?
Even though he could earn double or triple in the private sector, an immediate 31% increase, which brings his salary to $301,063, can only seem indecent in the eyes of public sector workers, who are offered increases totaling 9% in five years on the pretext that the State does not have the means to do better and that Quebec taxpayers are already the most taxed in North America.
The case of Mr. Koskinen is particularly spectacular, but the largest increases granted to senior civil servants, which range from 16.8% to 27.3%, are also impressive.
If, at the time of the Quiet Revolution and the construction of a modern State, the public service could appear as an exhilarating adventure, even a kind of mission which justified certain sacrifices, the private sector today competes with it. which is hard to sustain.
As far as possible, the State must ensure that it attracts and retains the best people, but it also has a duty of pay equity towards its employees who work in fields, such as health or education. , where he holds a quasi-monopoly which makes them prisoners of his goodwill.
It goes without saying that not all trades and professions can be paid at the same level, but the discrepancies observed in the private sector should not be transposed into the public apparatus. Whether it is the remuneration of his collaborators or the ethics of his ministers, Mr. Legault sometimes seems to confuse the two.
A teacher with between 5 and 10 years of experience earns an average of $16,000 less in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada, while the members of the National Assembly are preparing to grant themselves a base salary 10 $830 to that received by the highest paid parliamentarians in another province, namely those from Alberta. In other words, the Quebec school system, which the Superior Council of Education has described as the most unequal in the country, which is vigorously denied by the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, is therefore just as unfair for teachers as for students. .
Last Monday, the minister cried demagoguery when I asked him, in an interview at the editorial table of the Duty, how he could explain this iniquity. “You are really comparing the job of teacher at job deputy? Are you telling me that it compares”? he launched, as if he had seen in this question a real crime of lese-parliamentarianism.
Come to think of it, it is indeed difficult to compare the work carried out by a Member of Parliament in the quietude of parliament and that of a teacher who has to manage a class of 30 pupils five days a week, a quarter of whom suffer from learning difficulties. .
The same could be said of the nurses, who kill themselves with the task and who are markedly underpaid compared to their colleagues in other provinces. Short of leaving Quebec or reorienting their careers, what other possibility do they have when the government is about to abolish private agencies?
The Ministère des Finances forecasts that the famous “wealth gap” with Ontario, about which Mr. Legault continually tells us, will be closed around 2035-2036. Parliamentarians seem to consider that it is already done, but the public sector will clearly have to wait.
More immediately, the government must above all come to an agreement with its employees. Unfortunately, Mr. Drainville’s clumsy remarks are not likely to facilitate negotiations with the teachers’ unions, who wanted to see in them a condescension, even a contempt that he certainly does not experience, nor to encourage them to contribute to the success of the reforms he himself proposed.