Sunshine List Lengthens and becomes a gossip site

Jeff Green | Apr 12, 2023

There is something a bit unseemly about the sunshine list, the annual accounting of how many public sector employees in Ontario earn salaries over $100,000.

The list provides access to the name, job title, institution, and annual salary of every public employee who is directly funded, with Ontario taxpayer dollars, who make more than $99,999 each year.

Because the salary grids for union and non-unionised positions go up every year, and because of inflation, the list gets longer and longer every year.

In 1996, when the list was first published, it included under 4,500 names. In 2022, it includes over 265,000 names. With inflation, a $100,000 salary in 1996 is equivalent to a $170,000 salary in 2023 dollars.

At one time, the only education workers on the list were principals and high ranking administrators, at the school board level. Over time, classroom teachers began to make the list, and it has grown from there in just about every sector.

The idea behind the list was to provide the public, who pays these wages through taxes, information about all of the people who are getting rich on our collective dime.

In 2022, 684 employees of the Limestone District School Board made the list, including 311 elementary school teachers and 238 secondary school teachers.

The average wage of the elementary school teachers on the list is about $103,000.

Among the 70 employees of Frontenac County who made the list, 42 are unionised paramedics, and another 10, or so, work as supervisors and administrators for Frontenac Paramedic Services. Of the paramedics on the list, the average annual salary is about $108,000.

Even though the list has become very long, it still provides a good way to see if, for example, if the managers working for our local municipalities are paid more, or less, than people in the same position elsewhere in the region or in the province.

So, it is not surprising that there are 7 employees in South Frontenac on the list, 3 from Central Frontenac, 2 from Addington Highlands, and 1 from North Frontenac.

Over the last 5 years, South Frontenac has added a layer of directors to its staffing model, above managers and below the chief administrator, and hence 5 more people are on the list.

There is a more frivolous, almost gossipy side to the list as well, however.

It allows anyone to type in the name of a neighbour, a friend, an enemy, anyone who works in the public service, to find out if they get over $100k a year and if so, exactly how much.

Put it this way. I might want to know how much my friends, my neighbours or my relatives make each year, but I would never ask that question of them, because it is none of my business.

And, if someone I know stopped me on the street and asked me how much money I made last year, I would walk away.

In fact, one of the equalising factors of our community is that we keep that kind of information to ourselves. We can pretend to be richer or poorer than we are, we can maintain our self respect when our wages go up or down, we can measure our value as community members by other metrics, how much volunteering we do, how we help our neighbours, if our job contributes to the public good.

The sunshine list was created by Mike Harris when he became the premier. It was his intention to single out overpaid government workers in his quest for smaller government.

But now, in an era where a family income of $90,000 has become the threshold for federal dental benefit subsidies to kick,, $100,000 is still a good salary, but it is no longer so high that everyone who makes that, in the public sector, should have their wages disclosed to the public at large..

It is too much information for us nosy neighbours to get our hands on.

That being said, I do feel a bit sad for Frontenac County's perennial sunshine list leader, Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender, who is no stranger to the sunshine list. He first made the list back in 2006 when he was working for the Town of Perth, and has been on it ever since, climbing up the list every year. In 2022, he missed hitting the double sunshine level in 2022 by a whisker, $700 dollars.

Pender could easily vault over the threshold if he only charged Frontenac County a nominal fee for being their official weed inspector, a job that he does for free