The late Mitchell Sharp, widely regarded as the eminence grise of the Liberal Party of Canada, spent more than half a century in public service, as a civil servant to begin with and then as Minister of Finance and later Minister of Foreign Affairs in the cabinets of Pierre Trudeau.
Sharp was a man of self-effacing humour and generally mild disposition, although he could be hard-nosed and uncompromising when in his view the national interest demanded it. His reputation in Ottawa was such that when well on in years (82 in fact) Sharp signed on as a special advisor to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien. He remained in that position for a decade (1993 – 2003) and during the whole of that time insisted he be paid $1.00 a year. Mitchell Sharp could have commanded much more, but didn’t because of his conviction that serving the country didn’t necessarily mean serving oneself.
It would be useful if a man named David Denison referred to the Sharp biography because it might cause him to adjust his view of appropriate compensation. Denison is the president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, a crown corporation charged with managing our monthly CPP contributions. The CPPIB pays Mr. Denison a yearly salary of $490 thousand dollars. In round numbers, half a million.
But the current recession has been unkind to the board, and so it lost $24 billion dollars last year. Billion. Put another way, more than 18 percent of the Canada Pension Plan portfolio, public money, your money and mine, went down the spout.
Now the CPPIB has a bonus plan for its ranking executives, but In these money losing circumstances, one might have thought Mr. Denison – and three other senior board executives – would have foregone their allotments for the year. In the quixotic world of Ottawa bureaucrats, though, it was not to be.
Upon approval from his outside board of directors, David Denison placed in his pocket a bonus cheque for almost $2.4 million dollars, which when added to his comparatively modest annual salary took his total compensation for 2008 to a whisker less than $3 million.
(Denison was not alone at the trough: those three senior lieutenants also took whacks at the bonus pinata and gathered up a further $4.5 million dollars that came pouring out. If we do the sums, the total bonus package for this bureaucratic quartet was just short of $7 million dollars.)
When this vast, combined emolument became public knowledge a week or so ago, the sound and the fury in the House of Commons was at ten points volume. Ralph Goodale, who it seems has been a Saskatchewan Liberal MP since roughly the turn of the last century, said he would expect the Harper government to “invite the board to review their multimillion dollar bonuses in the context of a recession that’s killing the jobs of 350 thousand ordinary Canadians”
But the government said no, we surely wouldn’t do that. Finance minister Jim Flaherty, the man who counts deficit numbers on his fingers, insisted there’d be no getting involved in the operations of the pension board, which after all was set up as an arm’s length manager of public money. Ergo, there’d be no political interference from this government, no sir, not on your life.
Two issues now follow. The first is the nature of the House of Commons itself. Opposition MPs are dedicated almost exclusively to dreaming up what’s known as the television “sound bite,” the 15 or 20 second video squib which it’s hoped will pin the government to the wall. The difficulty is the Monday bite, or perhaps more accurately the Monday topic, is invariably replaced by a completely different topic on Tuesday, and then another on Wednesday, and so it goes.
Federal politicians, in short, have the attention span of a hummingbird, which is why with rare exceptions any issue, any point of contention is an ephemeral, will ‘o the wisp thing, flickering today and gone tomorrow.
David Denison may accordingly rest assured the high dudgeon over his bonus has disappeared, and he can now cash his $2.4 million dollar bonus cheque with no fear of further criticism. He’s content, apparently, to shelter behind the skirts of a recession which of course is external, not of his doing, not his fault, and actually, really, as a matter of fact, the CPPIB did pretty well considering the global economic washout. So don’t you be pointing any fingers at me.
The second issue is more important. It would never have occured to Mitchell Sharp, even with approval from an outside board of directors, to accept millions in bonus money in the midst of a destructive recession. His moral fibre and ethics were such that Sharp would have found the mere notion of a bonus reprehensible, let alone actually taking the money.
But David Denison, it appears, is not of such cloth. His acceptance of the bonus money suggests he has no understanding of the tenets of public service, and one suspects that even if he did. he’d probably be wholly uninterested in them.
On the contrary, Denison’s extra swag brings to mind the American poet Ogden Nash, whose snippets of doggerel on human frailty, and greed too, are the stuff of literary legend.
“Professional men, they have no cares. Whatever happens, they get theirs.”
Nash must have been thinking of David Denison.
