Wednesday, April 01, 2026
Last week, the 2025 Sunshine List was released, marking thirty years since it was first introduced—and it has never been clearer that the list has completely lost its relevance.
The Sunshine List documents the Ontario public sector employees who make over $100,000. The initial list published 30 years ago included 4,500 of the public sector’s highest-paid executives and senior leaders.
But the Sunshine List has never been adjusted to reflect inflation since it was first created. Updating the Sunshine List to reflect inflation would put the cut-off salary at $185,000—close to double its current threshold.
But because it has never been adjusted for inflation, the list has now ballooned to include approximately 405,000 names. With a provincial workforce of approximately 8.2 million people, the number of names on this year’s lists amounts to one out of every 20 working Ontarians.
AMAPCEO has also noted time and again that the Sunshine List poses a risk to public sector professionals: in at least one case, identifying an AMAPCEO member by name has exposed them to stalking and harassment.
Once again, AMAPCEO is calling on the government to:
- Adjust the Sunshine List for inflation
- Anonymize the list to show position titles, rather than names
Successive governments’ refusals to update the Sunshine List for inflation have made it functionally useless as a tool to shine a light on high-earning executives. Now it is nothing more than an invasion of public servants’ privacy. It’s past time for that to change.