NEGOTIATIONS? REALLY? What No one says out loud!

When ‘Negotiation’ Feels Like a Shakedown!

By Jim Taylor

If a stranger stopped you in an alley and said, “Nice house you’ve got. Be a shame if something happened and nobody could come help… unless you pay up,” you’d call that extortion and phone the police.
When it happens in the public sector, we call it “collective bargaining.”
I’m not saying anyone at CUPE, IAFF or City Hall is committing a crime. I am saying that, from the taxpayer’s side of the table, the way wage and benefit demands are presented can feel uncomfortably like a shakedown – and the weapon is “public safety.”
The message is rarely spoken out loud, but everyone hears it:
Pay what we’re asking, or accept longer response times, closed stations, brownouts, or cuts to other services.
When you are told, year after year, that there is no way to say “no” because fire, police and other “essential” services are involved, that’s not a free negotiation. That’s a captive customer.

A ‘negotiation’ where one side can’t leave

In a normal negotiation, both parties can walk away. If the price of a car is too high, you go to another dealer. If a contractor wants more than you can afford, you get other quotes.

Taxpayers don’t have that option with City Hall.

We can’t choose a different fire department or a cheaper city government. We can’t opt out of CUPE or IAFF wage settlements. We pay, through our taxes, whatever council agrees to. If we can’t afford it, we don’t get to “cancel the service.” We just cut back on groceries, heat, or prescriptions.

In theory, council is supposed to be the public’s voice at the table. In practice, the taxpayer is the only party not in the room. On one side sits the union leadership, whose job is to get the best possible deal for their members. On the other side sit council and senior staff, many of whom are also part of the broader public-sector pay and pension culture, and who will face their own bargaining tables in due course.

Meanwhile, the homeowner paying the bill is told after the fact that wages and benefits are up another 9.5% here, 10% there, and that anything less would have “jeopardized public safety.”

If that isn’t legal extortion, it certainly isn’t a negotiation between equals.

Using public safety as a human shield

Nobody disputes that firefighters, paramedics, police and front-line staff do important work. Many put themselves in harm’s way. That’s exactly why using “public safety” as a bargaining shield is so powerful – and so unfair to taxpayers.
When councils are warned that holding the line on wages could lead to station closures, longer response times or reduced services, how many elected officials are going to take that risk? If something goes wrong, they will be blamed for “underfunding” emergency services, not for protecting taxpayers from unsustainable wage growth.
So the threat doesn’t have to be shouted. It just has to be implied:
“If you don’t agree to what we’re asking, you’re putting your residents at risk.”
Try to imagine that same logic in your own life. If your electrician said, “Pay my 20% increase or I can’t guarantee your breaker panel won’t fail,” you’d find another electrician. Yet taxpayers can’t find another City of Nanaimo.
That’s the core of the problem: the same power imbalance that justifies above-average job security and pensions in essential services is also used to justify above-average wage increases, long after the community’s ability to pay has flatlined.

Nanaimo’s numbers make the point

You don’t have to look far to see how this plays out locally.

Council has approved roughly 40 additional firefighter positions in recent years while calls for service increased by only about 1.1 calls per day on average. On top of that, they approved a 9.5% wage increase for firefighters already averaging well over $150,000 a year in pay.

CUPE wages and benefits have more than doubled. Administrative pay has climbed by over 80%. Wages and benefits now swallow the lion’s share of our tax dollars, leaving less and less for the unglamorous basics like pipes, pavement and core infrastructure.

Meanwhile, many residents are treading water. According to Food Banks BC, about 1.3 million British Columbians – roughly one in four – are now experiencing food insecurity. Loaves and Fishes here in Nanaimo sees the reality of that every day.

So when City Hall signs off on another rich settlement and then tells the public, “We had no choice; it’s about safety,” it’s worth asking: whose safety are we really talking about? The safety of residents who can’t afford groceries, or the financial safety of those on the public payroll?

This isn’t anti-firefighter. It’s pro-reality.

The predictable response to any criticism of these deals is, “You’re attacking firefighters” or “You don’t value public servants.”

That’s nonsense.

Wanting fair, sustainable, reality-based wage settlements is not an attack on the men and women who show up when someone dials 911. It’s a defence of the people who pay for the entire system – the homeowner in a 60-year-old house whose property tax bill has exploded, the senior on a fixed income choosing between medicine and food, the young family watching both mortgage and taxes climb faster than their wages.

It is absolutely possible to say two things at once:

Public safety is essential, and frontline workers deserve respect.
Using “public safety” as a bargaining weapon to force unaffordable wage settlements is wrong.

We need councillors who can hold both thoughts in their heads at the same time.

A different kind of mandate

There is another wrinkle that makes the shakedown feeling worse: the shaky mandate behind many of these decisions.

In Nanaimo, six of eight councillors individually received fewer votes than the 8,600 residents who opposed the recent $90-million borrowing in the AAP. The Mayor was elected with support from less than 17% of eligible voters.

That is not a sweeping mandate to rubber-stamp wage and benefit growth far beyond what ordinary residents are seeing in their own paycheques.

If council wants to claim the moral high ground of “protecting public safety,” then it also needs to protect the public from being priced out of their own city by runaway payroll costs.

Time to stop pretending this is normal

If a private citizen tried to extract money from you by telling you your house might not be safe if you didn’t pay, everyone would know what to call it.
In the public sector, we hide the same basic pressure behind phrases like “maintaining service levels,” “meeting response time targets” and “protecting public safety.” It may be legal. It may be wrapped in professional language and polished presentations. But to the person who gets the tax bill, it can feel very much like a shakedown.
It’s time we stopped pretending that this is just normal “negotiation.” It isn’t, and everyone knows it.
Taxpayers are entitled to one simple, reasonable demand of their own:
No more wage and benefit settlements that grow faster than the community’s ability to pay.
If that standard is good enough for the people footing the bill, it ought to be good enough for the people spending it.

VOICE of NANAIMO