Group of Calgary councillors, mayor to lobby colleagues for salary freeze, despite disagreements on timeline

Calgary city council’s first meeting of the year is sure to be a busy one, and money is likely to top the agenda.

This week’s meeting will see Couns. Sonya Sharp, Andre Chabot, Terry Wong, Dan McLean, and Mayor Jyoti Gondek propose motions to implement a pay freeze for themselves and their colleagues.

Last week, the group of councillors issued a statement declaring their intention to propose a motion that would freeze council compensation at 2024 rates until 2030.

Gondek came out a short time later saying she would like to freeze compensation for 2025.

This comes as Mayor Jyoti Gondek and councillors started 2025 with a pay raise. The raise amounts to just over three per cent, bringing the salary for the city’s 14 councillors to $124,462.60 per year and the salary for the mayor to $220,298.83.

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Council pay, benefits, and other forms of compensation are determined by the Council Compensation Review Committee (CCRC) established in 2002.

In subsequent years, CCRC’s were formed to market benchmark council compensation and make recommendations for changes, according to the city.

In July 2006, council approved a recommendation from the CCRC to use the annual change in the Alberta Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) as the basis for future increases.

Then, in 2017, council accepted another committee recommendation that allowed council to vote, before each election, to accept or reject the use of the AWE indicator for the next four year term.

A council vote ahead of the 2021 election approved the use of the AWE indicator and the raise was formally approved during budget deliberations in December.

McLean said it made sense to go ahead with the raise at the time.

“We should be leading by example. Times are tough out there, and we’ve had three consecutive pay increases and four consecutive tax hikes,” he said. “Those two things don’t jive.”

“I think it’s the responsible thing to do, and you can expect it will pass.”

Gondek seems to agree, writing on X that now isn’t the time for elected officials to take a raise.

“Calgarians are struggling with higher grocery bills, increasing utility rates, and inflation,” she said. “If we’re asking City Administration to find efficiencies and Calgarians to stretch their budgets, we must hold ourselves to the same standard.”

The group of councillors said in their joint statement freezing compensation until 2030 would allow the next council and mayor, set to be elected in October, the ability to focus attention on the pressing issues of Calgarians.

With an election on the horizon, Chabot predicts 2025 will likely be a fiscally-focused year, as prospective candidates work to prove they can save money ahead of the vote.

“This year, you’ll see a lot of folks that would be typically more left-leaning becoming more conservative-minded for the next 10 months or so,” he said.

McLean agrees, saying for a council that has been divided on much, this should be something they can agree on.

“There has been a lot of contentious issues pushed through — blanket rezoning, they tried to cancel the fireworks, the bag bylaw, the tax hikes — I could go on. Maybe this year, in an election year, we might see a softer agenda,” he said. “You will see people being more fiscally responsible and probably listening to the residents more, which we should have been doing all along.”

Not all of council is in favour of a freeze, Coun. Penner said last week that a pay freeze would do nothing to help affordability issues for Calgarians.