Mayor Valérie Plante defended on Friday her administration’s decision to pay two bonuses to City of Montreal executives in 2023.
The mayor argued that these were bonuses for the year 2020, never paid by the City due to budgetary restrictions.
“The bonuses we are talking about are sums that were suspended in 2020, during the pandemic. We decided to give them to executives last May,” she argued in a press briefing. “For me, it is important to mention that these are not additional amounts as they were budgeted. It’s just that they were suspended in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, where everyone was asked to make an effort. We also asked the executives. »
“These are not new amounts, it was budgeted,” she added.
In 2020, the City of Montreal did not mention a “suspension” of these bonuses. “The administration has decided that the contribution of executives to the budgetary effort will be made by not paying any performance bonus for the year 2020”, underlined the City at the time, according to an article in the newspaper 24 hours. “We have canceled the bonuses,” added the mayor’s press secretary.
The Press revealed Friday morning that Montreal’s 1,800 municipal executives had received an average bonus of $3,150 in May, in addition to their usual performance bonus (average of $3,700). The second check corresponds to 85% of the first. Itself is equivalent to 2% to 6% of the annual salary and is determined based on the employee’s performance.
“It’s not really the bonus of 2020,” said the president of the executive committee, Dominique Ollivier, before the publication of the article. Executives who have left in the meantime do not receive the bonus and new executives – who lost nothing in 2020 – are entitled to it. “I am one of the executives who tightened their belts at that time and who had no return,” illustrated Mme Ollivier, who was president of the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) in 2020.
Mme Ollivier explained that it was more of a measure to retain its employees in a context of labor shortage.