With good reason, the judges have an independent commission to review their salaries, and I stress “with good reason.” If I understand it correctly, it goes back to an act in 1998.
As I've explained to the Minister before, it seems as if we've hired the most expensive professionals to review the salaries of the most expensive professionals. Then we have to have someone to sit on both sides — who again is a very expensive consultant — to come up with a simple percentage. I don't belittle the actual salary, but it seems like a very expensive process to come up with a percentage just to say “Increase their salaries.” I heard someone say, “Let’s throw away all this gobbledygook and just give them the $133,000.” Chop it up four ways, and we are probably at their increase anyway.
What's restricting us from finding some way to attach the judges’ remuneration to some type of cost-of-living process — independent of the MLAs, independent of the public service — whereby we don't have to renegotiate everything every three years or so? It would probably save a lot of time if we passed legislation that effectively would do what this negotiation process does.