Complaining that MLA salaries are too low, provincial Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had this to say: “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

Rustad was responding to another year’s freeze on MLA salaries, the third since the 2020 COVID outbreak.

While he acknowledged the political realities involved, he wants a better deal.

MLAs receive a standard salary of $119, 533 a year, scarcely “peanuts.”

Moreover, this is simply the baseline. There are endless top-ups.

The premier takes home $227,000, cabinet ministers get $179,000, and Opposition party leaders (Rustad among them) receive $150,000, and so on down the line.

So generous are the add-ons that every member of David Eby’s caucus gets one, as do both Green Party members and 11 of Rustad’s caucus.

Beyond the cabinet members, oodles of money are ladled out to parliamentary secretaries, committee chairs, deputy chairs, caucus chairs, government whips,........

© Times Colonist