Public Service: A Fair Way to Pay Prince George Councillors

During this fall's municipal campaign, candidates were asked a simple question: should city councillors be paid more, less, or the same? The answers were almost unanimous. Councillor Ramsay said pay should go up. Incoming Councillor McLaren said it should come down, and everyone else said leave it where it is.

"Keep it the same" is the safe answer at election time. Nobody loses votes defending the status quo. But it isn't an argument. It dodges the real question, which is how we should decide what a councillor is worth in the first place.

The city did try to answer it. In November 2025, a consultant's review for the city by Sainas Consult found that Prince George paid its councillors the least among a group of comparable B.C. municipalities. In December, the city's Advisory Committee on Council Remuneration used that review to recommend raising councillor pay to $58,346, the median of those peer cities. Councillors were paid $44,161 in 2025, so that is an increase of about $14,200, or 32 per cent. That is how these reviews work, because the bylaw requires it: every four years, council pay must be compared against a fixed list of peer municipalities. Line up the peer cities, see where we rank, and adjust upward.

The public didn't buy it. After the backlash, the committee backed away. Its final report in January 2026 dropped the straight raise in favour of performance-based increases, still capped at the peer-city median, and recommended that the committee itself be disbanded. In February, council received the report, dissolved the committee, and left pay where it was, apart from the small automatic adjustment the bylaw applies every January. That was the right call, but rejecting a number is not the same as having a better way to set one.

The peer-city comparison is the wrong yardstick.

First question: should councillors be paid at all?

Yes. Council governs a city at the heart of a region that has just passed 100,000 people, and it oversees an operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Councillors read thick agenda packages, sit on committees and regional boards, attend public hearings, and answer queries from residents. Done properly, it is a demanding job, often 30 hours a week or more.

If the job paid nothing, only the retired, the independently wealthy, and people with very flexible employers could take it on. Council would no longer reflect Prince George. A young parent working shifts, a nurse at UHNBC, or a small-business owner in the Hart couldn't afford to serve. Fair pay widens the pool of candidates.

But it shouldn't be a career

There is a second side to this. Council is public service. People put their names forward because they want to serve their community, knowing full well it is often a thankless task. They take criticism, field angry emails and make decisions that will never please everyone. That willingness to serve is the point, and pay should respect it, not replace it.

No democracy is served well by career councillors, or by people who hold a seat for decades because it has become their livelihood. Fresh faces bring new ideas. Turnover keeps council connected to the community it represents. When a council salary becomes more attractive than the jobs most residents hold, the incentive shifts from serving to staying.

So the goal is a salary that makes serving possible without making it a prize. Pay enough that a working person can afford to do the job, but not so much that the seat becomes the reason to run.

Second question: how much?

Comparing ourselves to other B.C. councils is circular. Each city points to the others, and every review cycle the whole group drifts upwards. It answers "what do other politicians make?" when the question should be "what is fair compensation for the people we elect?"

There is a better benchmark: the people councillors serve.

A simpler and fairer formula would be to pay councillors the median hourly wage for the hours the job actually takes:

• 30 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, a working estimate of the workload, for a total of 1,560 hours.
• The median hourly wage, weighted 50 per cent Canadian and 50 per cent Prince George. The national half anchors the job to a common standard. The local half ties it to our economy: when wages here rise, council's pay rises with them, and when residents struggle, council feels it too.

Statistics Canada does not publish a median hourly wage for Prince George, so the B.C. figure is the closest local stand-in. In 2025 the median hourly wage was $30.77 in Canada and $32.49 in B.C., which blends to $31.63. Over 1,560 hours, that works out to about $49,340 a year. That is an increase of around $5,200, or 12 per cent, over the $44,161 councillors were paid in 2025, not the $14,200 the committee recommended.

That figure is defensible — a councillor earns what a typical working person in this country and this city earns for the same hours: no more, no less. Nobody gets rich on it, and nobody is shut out by it.

Why 30 hours? Remuneration reviews elsewhere in B.C. put councillor workloads at roughly 20 to 30 hours a week. Prince George belongs at the upper end of that range: it is the service hub for the North. Some councillors represent the city on the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George board. Other councillors sit on standing committees such as finance and audit, and intergovernmental affairs, and represent the city on outside boards and agencies.

Even so, the hours should be checked. Once a term, the city should commission an independent review of how much time councillors actually spend on the job: council and committee meetings, regional board work, reading agenda packages, community events, and responding to residents. A few sample months of time logs, checked against meeting records, would be enough. If the job takes 25 hours a week, pay for 25. If it takes 35, pay for 35. Taxpayers would know exactly what they are paying for, and councillors who put in the work would have the evidence to show it.

Why this approach would work for Prince George

The formula takes the decision out of council's hands. Councillors would no longer vote on their own raises, and pay would update automatically whenever Statistics Canada releases new wage data.

It is also honest. The bylaw's official comparison list is Kelowna, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Victoria, Saanich, Delta, Coquitlam, Chilliwack, the Township of Langley and the District of North Vancouver, every one of them in southern B.C. Prince George isn't any of them, and it doesn't need to price its council as if it were. We are a working city in the North, built on forestry, health care, education, mining and trades. Our council's pay should reflect that, and so should the spirit of the job.

There is an opening to fix this. In February, then-Councillor Garth Frizzell, now Prince George's mayor, moved a motion asking city staff for options to remove or rewrite the section of the remuneration bylaw that requires a pay review every four years. The motion's stated aim was to protect volunteers: it asked for a process that would not leave "the neutral volunteer committees targeted and vilified." That concern is fair. No volunteer should face that kind of treatment for doing what council asked of them. But scrapping the review without replacing it would leave Prince George with no process at all, and the next pay decision would land back on council's own desk, where it doesn't belong. Staff are due to report back by the end of this year, so Mayor Frizzell's new council will be the one to decide. A formula tied to the median wage solves both problems: there is no committee to target, no politician sets their own pay, and every resident can check the number.

Council was right to say no to a 32 per cent raise. But caution isn't policy. Rather than waiting for another peer-city comparison and another backlash, council should ask a better question now: what does the typical person here earn for the same hours? Pay councillors that, cover the real costs of serving, and leave the seat as what it should be: a period of public service, not a career.

Documents

• Council Remuneration Bylaw No. 8414, consolidated April 2025. Annual adjustment, s. 2.4; expenses and the $40 childminding cap, s. 4; the four-yearly review and the peer cities, s. 7.
• 2025 Statement of Financial Information, p. 23. Councillor pay in 2025: $44,161.32.
• Remuneration committee, minutes of December 5, 2025. The $58,346 recommendation, built on Sainas Consult's November review.
• Council, minutes of February 2, 2026. Report received, committee dissolved, Frizzell motion on s. 7.
• Statistics Canada, table 14-10-0064-01. 2025 median hourly wage: $30.77 nationally, $32.49 in B.C.
• Victoria's 2024 remuneration review, surveying councillor hours across B.C.
• Colwood, City Council: A Commitment of Time.
• Citizen, Committee recommends $15.6K annual pay boost for Prince George councillors.
• Citizen, Prince George council rejects pay increase recommendation.
• Fraser-Fort George board appointments, report to council, October 25, 2022.
• Citizen, Council committee appointments confirmed.
• Official election results, October 17, 2026.
• CKPG, Statistics Canada estimate shows large growth for Prince George. Population 100,127 at July 1, 2025.