Isabel Mosseler
Tribune
West Nipissing municipal councillors have approved a 27% increase to their base compensation, following a narrow 5-4 vote during the April 15 council meeting. This marks the first significant salary adjustment in more than two decades, with the mayor’s pay rising from $35,482 to $44,877 and councillors’ salaries increasing from $17,748 to $22,532.
The decision followed three meetings of intense debate and the delivery of a third-party compensation review prepared by consulting firm Pesce and Associates. The review placed West Nipissing’s elected officials below the 50th percentile of comparable municipalities, which became the benchmark adopted in the final resolution. The increase takes effect immediately.
The vote came after two attempts to delay or phase in the pay adjustment were defeated. Councillor Georges Pharand proposed a compromise that would have phased in the increase over three years, starting in 2026, but it was rejected 7–2. Councillor Roch St-Louis later proposed deferring the increase entirely until the next term of council, a motion that also failed.
Pharand, who supported the idea of improved compensation but raised concerns about timing and transparency, was one of several councillors who expressed unease about the scope and methodology of the consultant’s review. “We have only what, six or seven comparables,” he noted during the meeting, suggesting the consultant should have cast a wider net. “It would have been easy to give us a much wider scope to look at. There is public record. You just need to Google what is the salary of the mayor of Kenora.”
Despite this criticism, Pharand acknowledged that the figures presented were likely accurate: “I googled a lot of municipalities of our size and the answer seems to be coming back around the same figures, but it would be more robust (…). In the eyes of the public, I think the report would have had more strength.”
The public response to the proposed raise has been mixed, with some residents expressing disapproval online. In response, several councillors stressed that the process was appropriate and transparent. Councillor Jamie Restoule, acting as Deputy Mayor, emphasized that the increase was part of a comprehensive compensation review—not simply a pay raise. “We didn’t sit around and say ‘let’s give ourselves a raise.’ We hired a third party, gave them instructions, and they brought back the data,” he said. “We did this, I believe, in the right way.” Restoule also encouraged residents to engage more directly and not rely on social media posts, indicating he only had one constituent approach him directly to discuss the matter. “To those folks online, if you want to influence things, reach out (…) When you put something on Facebook, that’s not reaching out.”
Mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon pointed out that the increase had already been accounted for in the 2025 budget: “The increase that we’re looking at now has actually already been approved (…). It had been identified (…) that West Nipissing was one of the municipalities that never made adjustments to councillors’ salaries to account for the loss in take-home pay after the federal tax changes.”
