Time to tweak the Sunshine list

On Friday, the Ontario government went through its annual ritual of releasing a list outlining how much the province’s top public servants were paid the previous year.

The 2017 list, the so-called Sunshine list, marks the 21st time Ontario has gone through this exercise.

Among the more concerning items on this year’s list for Niagara is the information regional taxpayers paid more than $482,000 to two police chiefs, former chief Jeff McGuire and new chief Bryan MacCulloch. This is due to the still-controversial decision by the Niagara police services board to buy out McGuire’s contract and hire a new chief.

And the disclosure on the 2017 Sunshine list marks only part of the cost of that decision. McGuire retired in June after the police services board offered him $870,000 plus perks and benefits to leave the service three years before his contract expired.

MacCulloch, who served as one of McGuire's two deputy chiefs, was hired as chief in September. The board has declined to release MacCulloch's salary as chief. The Sunshine list figure includes his less than four months as chief in 2017, and his time as a deputy and acting chief.

The Sunshine list only includes salary before taxes, and so does not include McGuire's retirement package. The former chief received half the cash payout — $435,000 — in July and the rest by mid-January.

As a comparison, Toronto’s police Chief Mark Saunders was paid $337,744.78 in 2017.

Other Niagara notables include salaries at Niagara Health, whose top five earners were also the top five earners in the region, with chief of staff Dr. Thomas Stewart leading the way at $428,217.

Every year, following the release from the list, we hear public complaints about the salaries paid to these public servants. We also inevitably hear renewed debate over how worthwhile this exercise is.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said on Friday she believes it's important for the government to publish the list. "Let me just say that we are committed to transparency. We think the people in the province have a right to know what folks are earning," Wynne told reporters, echoing a refrain made by every premier since former Conservative premier Mike Harris, whose government created the list.

We agree and believe this annual release is worth the effort as it gives the public glimpse into what government costs. But we do believe some changes are needed – in particular to the salary threshold at which a person’s name makes it onto the list.

In 1996, in its first year in office, one of the first actions of the Harris government was to pass the Public Salary Disclosure Act, the legislation behind the Sunshine list. At the time of its passage, the act set a salary disclosure threshold of $100,000 and that hasn’t changed in 21 years.

The first release of salaries included just below 4,576 names. This year’s list included 131,741. It has become so large, it is extremely unwieldy to search.

While we recognize that $100,000 per year is still a sizable salary for many people, we also have to admit $100,000 is not what it was in 1996. When inflation is taken into account, a $100,000 salary in 1996 would be worth $151,929 in today's dollars, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.

We think a jump in the threshold by that magnitude is too large and too sudden. But a gradual annual increase in the threshold is not unreasonable, going in increments of, say $10,000 for the next few years.

Such a change would make release of the list more effective, would enable the public to more easily search the database and would continue to meet the goal for which the Salary Disclosure Act was originally passed – to create transparency in government spending and publicly-paid salaries.