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Talk about being tone deaf.

MPs, who fled Ottawa over concerns about COVID-19 on March 13, will pocket a pay raise on April 1, the same day many Canadians will be wondering how to make rent or mortgage payments. It’s also the same day the carbon tax goes up.

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How’s that for a double whammy?

MPs currently have a base salary of $178,900. That doesn’t include their housing allowance for their time in Ottawa or the per diems that they get to cover meals while on government business.

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It doesn’t cover extra pay for sitting on a committee, chairing a committee or being a cabinet minister — that will net you an extra $85,500 yearly.

Well, add another roughly $2,800 to their annual salaries.

For the Prime Minister, who earns double what an MP makes, his annual salary of $357,800 is about to go up by almost $5,700.

Now in the grand scheme of things where the government was sending money out the door faster than they could print it even beyond the COVID-19 crisis, this raise doesn’t add up to much.