The news that senior executives at Emera and its wholly owned, profit-protected subsidiary, Nova Scotia Power, topped their million-plus, one-per-center-club-members-in-good-standing pay packets with raises from 20 to 30 per cent last year prompts all sorts of intriguing questions.
For starters, how many of the company’s secretaries sat on the compensation committee? The short answer: none.
And how many of Emera’s little old lady shareholders clutching their 10-share legacies for their grandchildren were invited to weigh in this larcenous largesse? Ditto.
Given the usual corporate-speak, soft-shoe routine about how such increases—Emera president and CEO Chris Huskilson now tops $2.99 million, executive vice president Nancy Tower $1.4 million and Nova Scotia Power president and CEO Rob Bennett $1.15 million—simply reflect company performance, how likely is it that Emera’s 35 per cent drop in profits so far this year will show up in next year’s executive take home pay?
If you think it will, I have a Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project for sale cheap.
And, since the company’s board of directors obviously believes its top executives are worth dramatic pay increases, will it offer similar 20-30 per cent increases to its unionized work force when the next contract is up for renewal? Or will it tout the flip-side arguments: increasing fuel costs, the need for new capital investment, the general state of the real-world work economy to low-ball its waged workers. Two guesses. The first doesn’t count.
There are other questions too. How much better would Nova Scotia Power’s salt-fog, stiff-breeze, power’s-out-again response time be if it invested in hiring more linemen instead of underwriting the summer homes and sailboats of its top executives?
And one more, larger question. Why did Donald Cameron’s short-lived Tory government peddle Nova Scotia Power, then a successfully publicly-owned and operated public utility—to the private sector back in 1992.
The ostensible reason was to pay down public debt.
Our debt is higher now, and still rising.
And we no longer have a public utility that takes into account the public interest. Perhaps that was the real purpose.
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax and co-founder of its MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels and eight non-fiction books. Buy his books 
Nova Scotia Power is completely out of control these days, Seems to me that when people, and I use that term loosly, makes more money then some think the company is actually is worth something is wrong, People are cold and sometime freezing in the winter months because they cannot keep up with there power bills but yet you people still want more, YOU PEOPLE MAKE MR SICK.
Given the savaging that the NDP government has received in the comments section of local news reports on NSP rate hikes, who can offer informed comment on Premier Dexter’s seemingly pro-NSP public comments? As a former newsperson from Halifax, and a current non-resident pining for the blueberry patch, hoping to return in the next year or so to my homeland, the vision of an NDP government that is not clearly taking action (even within its limited legislative / legal means as a result of the PC’s privatization of NSP) is hard to wrap one’s head around. The fact that they’re not even paying lip service to this evil, foreign-owned multinational corporation (which is also screwing over rateholders in the Caribbean)… well… I’m befuddled.
Does the NS Government need to revamp its communications department? Or is there really no plan to communicate?
What the H-E-Double-Hockeysticks is going on up there in Nova Scotia?
You hit an interesting point, Stephen. Why don’t the shareholders speak up. The rest of the world is discussing compensation packages at AGMs, why isn’t Emera?