BRINGING HARMONY TO ALL THE COMMUNITIES
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Volume 12 Issue 325 Safar 1, 1434 AH / December 14, 2012 - $1
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Israel halts Palestinian tax transfer
Shots fired in Ikea’s Richmond parking lot A number of gunshots were fired in the Ikea parking lot in Richmond, B.C., on Tuesday afternoon, but no one was hit and no one is in custody, police say. The shots rang out about 4:30 p.m. PT in the ground level parking area underneath the large mezzanine-level store where hundreds of people were shopping. An area of the parking lot was cordoned off with police tape as investigators poured over the scene.
$43B federal payroll the focus of government budget report Canada’s budget watchdog will release Tuesday the first report in more than a decade on how the federal government spends $43 billion on pay, pension and benefits on federal workers. The federal payroll is the government’s biggest single operating cost and some would argue is probably one the least scrutinized and poorly managed. Some have estimated that the total compensation cost of the average public servant has reached more than $110,000 a year when pensions and all benefits are rolled in. Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page began the report more than a year ago and has examined the growth of the public service and the wage bill over the past 20 years. It counts the study among the major reports the office has undertaken. The government spends about $43 billion in total compensation for all federal workers, from the public service to the military, RCMP and ministerial staff. The total was about $23 billion a decade ago, before the public service went on an unprecedented growth spurt. The public service has see-sawed over the past 20 years between healthy raises during good times when surpluses rolled in, and wage freezes, cuts and layoffs during lean times. Salaries fell behind during the freeze of the 1990s, slowly catching up and then racing ahead of the private sector. The Conservatives have taken aim at mounting compensation in their spending cuts. The government is wiping 19,200 positions off payroll, reforming pensions so employees shoulder more of the costs, capping wage increases, freezing operating budgets to rein in salaries, and eliminating severance payments for public servants who voluntarily leave or retire. At the same time, the biggest run-up in the size of the public service and the wage bill came under the Conservatives’ watch, between 2006 and 2011. The last major study of its kind was ordered as
part of the Paul Martin government’s drive to clean up public management and improve transparency and accountability. The massive study was led by James Lahey, who also recommended a major overhaul to improve the management of compensation, including regular reports to Parliament. The report was kept secret as a cabinet confidence and wasn’t released until the Conservatives came to power but none of the major recommendations were implemented. His 2003 study found the average public servant in the core public service and separate agencies, such as the Canada Revenue Agency, earned about $53,300 in salary, and closer to $73,400 when all benefits were rolled in. Lahey long insisted the system would work better if all the pieces of compensation were managed together. Costs would be better controlled if collective bargaining was expanded beyond negotiating wages, pay and benefits were kept in line with those of the private sector and there was more scrutiny or transparency thrown on the process. “I do think there should be a holistic view of what kind of people do we want and how should we pay them, comparable to outside work, to achieve our goals,” said Lahey. Many argue that compensation has to be a critical piece of the government’s plan to renew the public service and goes hand-in-hand with broader reforms in recruitment, retention, succession planning, training and development. A recent study by the Institute for Research on Public Policy on federal pensions urged the government to rethink the public service pension plan, which is eating up about 20 per cent of the government’s total wage bill. The author Bob Baldwin said the plan is heading for the “tipping point” where public
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Israel has halted the transfer of tax and tariff money it collects for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in response to their successful bid for UN non-member observer state status. Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s finance minister, said on Sunday that the government would use the money it was to transfer to the Palestinians to pay down their debt to the Israel Electric Corporation and other Israeli bodies. “I have no intention of transferring the taxes due to the Palestinian Authority this month,” Steinitz said. “They will be used to pay the PA debts to the Israeli electricity company and other bodies.” Without the transfer, the PA will not have the money to pay government salaries. Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston, reporting from Ramallah, said 150,000 public service employees rely on the money. The move is the second such act by Israel. On Friday, it announced it would press ahead with plans to build thousands of settler homes on illegally occupied territory. Johnston said the new settlements would mean a 25km journey from Bethlehem to Ramallah would be more than quadrupled to 120km as Palestinians would be forced to circumvent the settlements. This move, said Johnston, would make it “very difficult for Palestinians to have any kind of a contiguous state” in the future. Ahead of the UN vote, Israel’s government had warned the Palestinians and the international community that it would react harshly to an upgraded status for the Palestine, accusing them of leapfrogging negotiations and disregarding peace accords. The Palestinians say the upgraded status does not contradict any effort for new talks, pointing out that negotiations have been on hold since late September 2010. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said a total of $120m would be withheld from the Palestinians. Every month, Israel transfers tens of millions of dollars in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports. The tax revenues constitute a large percentage of the Palestinian budget and are governed by the 1994 Paris Protocols with the Palestinians. Israel has frozen payments to the PA before, usually during times of diplomatic tension. The UN victory for the Palestinians was a diplomatic setback for Israel, which was joined by only a handful of countries in voting against upgrading the Palestinians’ observer status at the UN to “non-member state”, like the Vatican, from “entity”. Source: Al-Jazeera
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