More than 111,000 public servants made $100,000 and up

Ontario’s taxpayer-funded $100,000 club includes more than 100,000 members for first time ever.


Thestar.com
March 27, 2015
By Robert Benzie, Richard J. Brennan, Rob Ferguson


Ontario’s taxpayer-funded $100,000 club includes more than 100,000 members for first time ever.

The annual “sunshine list” of six-figures-and-up earners on the provincial public payroll released Friday included 111,440 people in 2014 - 13,644 more than the 97,796 the year before or a 13.9 per cent increase.

That means the equivalent of the population of cities the size of Burlington or Thunder Bay made this year’s tally, which was organized in six volumes spanning 2,491 pages.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said the government has no intention of changing the $100,000 benchmark even though it has been eroded by inflation.

“It is still important for people to have that information ... $100,000 is still a lot of money,” she said in Cambridge, noting the government is working on salary caps on “upper end” public-sector executives.

Wynne earned $208,974, though her salary, like all MPPs, has been frozen since 2009.

Progressive Conservative interim leader Jim Wilson made $159,266 while NDP Leader Andrea Horwath took home $158,157.

Cabinet ministers made $165,851 while MPPs’ base salary remained $116,550 and parliamentary assistants made $133,799.

Thanks to severance payments, former premier Dalton McGuinty made $189,667 last year while Dave Gene, his ex-deputy chief of staff, pulled in $117,002 even though both departed Queen’s Park in early 2013.

The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act was launched in 1996 by former Conservative premier Mike Harris to shine light on the salaries of public servants from bureaucrats to police, teachers and other workers.

Inflation is a major factor in why the sunshine list continues to swell. The symbolic $100,000 figure of almost a generation ago is worth $145,046 today, according to the Ontario consumer price index.

Conversely, $100,000 today is the equivalent of $70,260 in 1996.

If the threshold had kept pace with inflation there would be 19,260 public servants on it - that’s how many made more than $145,046.

Despite that incongruity, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have refused to raise the $100,000 mark out of fear of political blowback.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, like their Liberal predecessors, have blocked attempts at a similar federal list of six-figure earners.

But it is known that federal elected officials and their political staff and bureaucrats earn considerably more than their Ontario counterparts.

Queen’s Park noted because public employees are paid biweekly every second Thursday, the latest list reflects wages earned in all of 2014 plus a portion of 2013 since workers received 27 pay cheques last year instead of the usual 26.

In the Ontario public service alone, that pushed 2,200 employees above $100,000 even though they usually earn less than that annually.

Still, Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod (Nepean-Carleton) pointed out that despite government claims of across-the-board wage freezes the sunshine list keeps rising.

“I’ve been saying for years that the way the government is handling Ontario’s finances is unsustainable,” said MacLeod, who made $125,174.

She warned that because “wage envelopes” are frozen, fewer people are earning more money, meaning front-line services will have to be cut.

NDP MPP Catherine Fife, who made $118,664, said the government is a “walking-talking contradiction” that is slashing services for the most vulnerable while forking over huge payments to public-sector executives.

“These bloated CEO salaries are a slap in the face to Ontarians,” said Fife (Kitchener-Waterloo). “This government has its priorities all wrong.”