Sunshine list is supposed to make us irate enough to demand change
There’s nothing like the annual sunshine list to get us all hot under the collar … unless we’re one of those lucky enough to be on it.
The annual list of those public sector employees making more than $100,000 continues to grow by leaps and bounds. It now includes some 244,000 workers, up 19 per cent from 205,000 in 2020.
Beyond pushing more people into the top five per cent of wage earners (well, earning is a bit of stretch, to many minds), such pay now eats up some 55 per cent of all program spending.
We spend more, and get less as a rule, all the while paying the non-productive part of the economy at twice the rate of what the average taxpayer makes.
Unchecked spending, particularly on salaries, benefits and pensions, has driven up taxes and contributed to the souring of public opinion beyond what lying and corrupt politicians have historically been able to do all on their own.
Even politicians, never eager to act in the public interest except to save their skins, are taking note. It’s the impetus behind talk of restraint, though that’s gone out the door at the federal and municipal levels, with even the Ford government at Queen’s Park being criticized for failing to follow through on much-needed reforms. We’re moving away from any kind of accountability from government.
“Many Ontario taxpayers have seen their pay cut or businesses closed, but meanwhile government employees were busy getting raises,” says Jay Goldberg, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, we’re clearly not all in this together.”
The organization is calling on the province to reel in the bureaucracy given that the sunshine list showed the number of government employees making $100,000 or more grew by 38,536.
Ontario’s debt exceeds $440 billion, with this year’s deficit projected to be $13.1 billion.
“Ontario is the most indebted sub-national government in the entire world,” said Goldberg. “It’s time for the government to start acting like it and that means reducing the size and cost of the bureaucracy.”
While governments expanded and salaries increased through the pandemic, the belt-tightening most of us endured leaves us in no mood to accept that others aren’t sharing in the hardships. That goes double for those people paid from the ever-increasing taxes taken from our diminishing paycheques.
Various forums, blogs and news sites are filled with vitriol aimed at civil service employees. Talk of inflated wages, generous benefits, casual working conditions and job security fuel countless rants. While many exaggerate the situation, there’s no arguing there is a growing income gap between public employees and the average taxpayer. When times are tough, the simmering dissatisfaction with that unsustainable situation is bound to boil over. The anger is building up a good head of steam.
The annual sunshine list is fuel on the fire.
There’s been an upward trend since reporting such salaries was made mandatory beginning in 1996.
The idea was to show the public how many government employees were pulling in large dollars, even as their unions cried poor in the face of the tougher fiscal policies. We were meant to be ticked off by the long inventory of names.
Back then, there were 4,319 names on the list. Today it’s grown by a factor of 56.
Perusing the list, few Ontarians would have trouble with the salaries paid to doctors, researchers and similar professionals. There are more than raised eyebrows however over bus drivers, utility workers, janitors, firefighters, educators and the like raking in money far in excess of what the average taxpayer makes. Facing ever-increasing electricity bills – again, much higher costs for no additional benefit – we’re rightly ticked off to see workers from Ontario Power Generation walking on sunshine. That includes the highest figure on the list, OPG’s chief executive Kenneth Hartwick, who was paid $1,628,246. (We no longer receive updates about the thousands more at Hydro One thanks to former premier Kathleen Wynne’s decision to sell off part of the public asset in order to help cover up her fiscal mismanagement.)
Inclusion on the list puts government employees in the top five per cent of all earners in the province.
Once seen as a place where job security came with lower wages, public service now means higher-than-average pay, benefits and working conditions. As the public sector grows, it becomes an even bigger burden.
Salary figures indicate a growing gap between civil service wages and the average earning of private sector employees. The discrepancy is likely to increase, as average industry wages will remain stagnant or decline dramatically in some industries as layoffs take hold. Even though the recession is officially over, unemployment remains high and private-sector wages depressed.
The gap and resultant drag on society is well documented in recent studies, as others pile on to show the negatives of the public sector.
The combined size of the federal, provincial, and municipal governments increased in all but two provinces over the 2007 to 2019 period relative to the sizes of their economies, finds a new study released by the right-leaning Fraser Institute
“The size of government increased in eight of ten provinces and the country as a whole going into the pandemic,” said Alex Whalen, policy analyst at the Fraser Institute and co-author of The Size of Government in Canada in 2019.
The study measures federal, provincial, and local government spending in each province as a share of the economy (GDP) from 2007 to 2019, the most recent year of comparable data. Both 2007 and 2019 preceded a recession and thus provide an opportunity to compare like-years.
It finds that government size grew in every province except Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island during that period. In
2019, the size of government relative to the economy as a whole across