Thursday, March 30, 2017
In advance of the release of this year’s “Sunshine List,” AMAPCEO has a few suggestions on how to fix it for greater public benefit.
Since 1996, the province has disclosed the names, positions, and salaries of those who earn $100,000 or more in government-funded organizations.
Adjust the threshold and tie it to inflation
$100,000 in 1996 has the same buying power as $148,299.32 in today’s dollars.
Dave Bulmer, the President of AMAPCEO, is calling on the government to show some perspective. “When the Sunshine List started twenty one years ago, the average price of a home in the GTA was $198,150. Today it’s $730,472. Keeping the threshold at the same rate for 21 years is misleading Ontarians and is making the List increasingly irrelevant.”
AMAPCEO wants to see the government raise the threshold to that rate and tie it to inflation.
Remove individuals’ names
AMAPCEO has raised this with many senior elected government officials—and they have not been able to identify any public benefit in disclosing individual, non-executive employees’ names on the list.
“This government seems to think it’s appropriate to disclose the name of a hard-working non-management civil servant—but not the Hydro One executive earning $4.84 million,” President Bulmer said. “That’s not right.” Hydro One employees were exempted from the list when this government began selling off the public asset. Last year, their top five executives shared more than $11 million in compensation.
In fact, recent comments even seem to suggest that at least one government minister sees having your salary disclosed on the Sunshine List as a punishment for not capitulating to the Employer’s demands during negotiations.
AMAPCEO believes individuals’ names should be removed to protect the privacy of workers who do not exercise executive authority.
Add consultants
The government relies far too much on private consulting firms, whose names are missing from the list. As AMAPCEO recently highlighted, these consultants are often used as an expensive substitute for full-time employees to skirt arbitrary limits on staffing placed by the government.
“While the OPS ‘human resources ledger’ remains at a hard number,” said President Bulmer, “the reality is that the actual number of people working on a project is much higher than what’s portrayed to the general public—and far more costly.”
It’s time for the OPS to ‘shine a light’ on how public dollars are spent by proactively disclosing high-level details of all contracts valued at over $10,000 through an online database.
“We owe it to ourselves and to the taxpayers of this province to shed some sunshine on contracting out.”
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Last year, AMAPCEO ‘shined a light’ on 11 things you (maybe) didn't know about the Sunshine List.