Do B.C. politicians need to be paid more?

I’ll give you a moment to finish yelling “NO!” at your computer screen.

It’s okay. Let it out. This is a safe space.

Now, let's hear a counterpoint. It comes from Opposition BC Conservative Leader John Rustad: “I’ll put it in very crude terms: You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

The annual MLA salary of $119,533 is hardly bananas in a province where the median family income was $101,520 as of 2022. But Rustad’s argument, first articulated in that zinger of a quote to The Globe and Mail earlier this month, is that the amount still isn’t enough to attract a young professional into the brutal world of politics.

“For those people that are in their middle years, whether it's in the mid-30s to maybe even to the early 50s, those are the prime earning years for people, and if you want those kind of people, professionals with the experience to enter into the business, you need to be able to compensate them accordingly,” Rustad said Thursday.

Without attractive pay, political life is otherwise confined to those who are already wealthy or those retired and looking for something else to do, he........

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