Thursday, March 24, 2016
At the end of March every year, the Government of Ontario publishes its “Sunshine List,” in which government-funded organizations disclose the names, positions and salaries of employees who make $100,000 or more in a calendar year.
In anticipation of this year’s list, we've compiled 11 confounding facts about Ontario’s Sunshine List.
1. Sunshine Lists are not new, and may be found in many places. An extreme example is Norway which, in its skatteliste, publishes the income of all its citizens. The Government of Ontario has yet to indicate an interest in implementing such an approach here.
2. Until 1985, Ontario public servants’ salaries which exceeded a threshold were disclosed in the Public Accounts. In the 1970s, the threshold was $20,000. By 1984, the threshold had been increased to $40,000.
3. At the $40,000 threshold, every current AMAPCEO member in the OPS would appear on the Sunshine List. Of course, unlike today, the government used to keep the disclosure practical by periodically increasing the threshold.
4. The current version of the Sunshine List was a campaign pledge by the Mike Harris Progressive Conservatives. They meant the list to disclose the salaries of senior public servants.
5. This intent was underlined by Ernie Eves (the then Minister of Finance) when he introduced the enabling legislation in 1995.
6. The first Sunshine List, which covered 1996, had 984 entries from the Ontario Public Service. Of those, 25 were Deputy Ministers and 50 were Assistant Deputy Ministers. There were also over 300 lawyers, 245 judges and around 100 doctors.
7. There was not a single AMAPCEO member on that first Sunshine List.
8. Due to inflation, today it would take $144,267 to acquire the equivalent value of goods that $100,000 could buy in 1996. For some perspective, in 1996 the average price of a home in Toronto was $198,150 (today it’s $685,278); a TTC cash fare was $2 (today it’s $3.25); and a litre of gas was 56 cents (today it’s 96 cents).
9. If we assume—questionable as it might be in the face of the current government’s agenda—wages keeping pace with inflation and increasing at 2% per year, every single AMAPCEO member working in the OPS will appear on the Sunshine List in the year 2056.
10. Premier Wynne has ruled out adjusting the Sunshine List to reflect inflation, saying that “$100,000 is still a lot of money.”