Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I mean, I feel this is, again, just a really, like, no win type situation. The intention of this bill to begin with was to smooth out this bizarre CPI high, you know, number that we currently see and this is sort of an artificial one and isn't expected to continue on like that and it now has somehow involved into some conversation about what we should be doing to sacrifice ourselves as MLAs to show solidarity to our constituents. And to me that really sort of wreaks of virtue signalling. We make $114,000 a year base salary. If I went to go work for the GNWT with the qualifications and the experiences that we have, and all of my colleagues have, we would make 50 grand at least a year more in the GNWT. A director in the GNWT makes $190,000 a year. I am a single person. When I look at other people that are making this comments about that they can go without this, they are all in dual income households.
And I think that this is something that I have noticed time and again in this Assembly and in the general where we put income thresholds, where we put, you know cost of living offsets, all of that, it penalizes single people. And I'm not saying that we as an Assembly and ourselves -- you know, we are distinct and unique and different than the general population, but are we going to sit here and talk about not penalizing seniors and elders and things and then, you know, when I look around and see that others who have other sources of income coming in, some people still have businesses. And all we're asking for is the cost of living raise that we were already promised that an independent commission agrees with, and we are saying that we will smooth out this weird CPI bump to not take advantage of it. So I think if anything, that actually shows, that piece of it, is what's showing that we have knowledge and understanding and awareness of what the people of the territory are dealing with. I don't think by saying, you know, we're going to, you know, not take this increase, that we're really going to have that much impact. Like, I feel already for the amount of time that I put in for 114K a year, I'm not making very much per hour. I work constantly all the time and I have to laugh when people say to me oh, I'm sorry I've called you outside of work hours. I'm like, I don't have work hours. I'll leave here tonight and I will spend the next two hours after I get home talking to people online and hearing their concerns.
So at the end of the day, people can call me what they want; they can call me greedy, they can call me anything. They can say I'm out for myself. I've read it all online, all the things about myself. However, at the end of the day engineers are not by their act allowed to devalue their work by discounting the price of it. So by telling MLAs that we shouldn't be getting raises, we don't deserve these things when we've been killing ourselves for four years during a pandemic, I think it's disingenuous, and it's devaluing the work that MLAs do, and we will continue to get the quality of people that we have seen in the past if we don't value MLAs properly. Thank you, Madam Chair.