Well, in what has become almost a form of annual homage to
Gilbert and Sullivan, Ontario released its
public sector salary list yesterday and there are a lot of "victims" on this year's little list - 131,741 to be precise. The number has
grown steadily since the list was first published in 1996 with 4,576 names on the list and since the $100,000 threshold remains the same without any inflation adjustment, twenty years of salary progression has increased the number of names above the threshold. Indeed, if you adjust for inflation, the threshold today would be about $150,000 and about 85 percent of names currently on the list would be eliminated bringing it down to about 20,000 which still is nearly a quadrupling of numbers since 1996.
However, there is a reluctance to adjust the threshold to account for inflation and as the Premier of Ontario herself has noted, the people of the province have a right to know what public servants are earning because after all $100,000 is still a significant amount of money to the "vast majority" of Ontario residents. This is a somewhat curious statement given what seems the Premier's lack of concern about other big numbers when it comes to Ontario's public finances. For example, the provincial net debt is
at about $312 billion which is indeed a significant amount of money as is the nearly $12 billion dollars annually required to service it.
Perhaps the problem is the difficulty many have in dealing with numbers that are so large that they are outside their daily experience. After all, most people deal with numbers in the thousands when it comes to salaries and annual living expenses rather than billions. What is needed here is perhaps some type of currency conversion mechanism that translates these large numbers into something the public can more easily grasp.
So, how many "Listers" at a threshold of $100,000 would make up the Ontario public debt? That number comes out to 3,120,000 - which is still a very large number - and represents just under half of total employment in Ontario which is at about 7 million people. However, a number in the millions is still very large. Ontario this week will deliver a budget and the expectation is that the deficit may reach $8 billion. How many "Listers" would make up an $8 billion deficit? Well, 80,000 which is a much more manageable number but as a number still higher than the median income of Canadians. How many Presidents and CEOs of the Independent Electricity System Operator fit into the net public debt? About 416,000. Ministers of Northern Development and Mines? You can get 1.89 million of those. But I digress...
It remains that the list is needed as an indicator of public sector spending as well as to provide transparency as to what the public sector spends notwithstanding what has become an exercise in showmanship without any effort to gain some additional insight and understanding about public sector spending. Indeed, the fixation on the large numbers in the annual release masks the fact that there should be some serious concerns expressed about how the list is constructed, transparency and indeed what it tells us about people and what they are paid and how that information is used.
First, while the "List" was supposed to be an accountability device that would somehow restrain the growth of public sector salaries it remains that it has not. Indeed, I would venture that making the salaries public has actually provided a basis of individual comparison that has resulted in driving salaries up in the broader public sector not just in Ontario but across the country. You don't hear about private sector salaries being driven up in part because that information is usually considered proprietary or confidential and its absence hinders the ability of individuals to make comparisons and decide they deserve more and make use of it to negotiate a higher salary.
Second, the list is inequitable because it separates public servants based on an arbitrary threshold that was selected because at the time it seemed like a big, round number - $100,000. However, for true accountability, all public sector salaries should be reported. There should be two lists released every year - a public sector salary disclosure list with those making over $100,000 and another with those making under $100,000. Yes, the list would be very very large but that would be the point. There are a large number of broader public sector workers and public sector spending in Ontario is not just driven by the 131,741 people making over $100,000 but also by the over 1 million people in the broader public sector making under $100,000. Would it be an invasion of the privacy of those individuals making a more modest income of say $80,000. Well, what do you think releasing a list of the salaries of someone making $100,000 actually is in a town with only 100,000 or 5,000 people? We don't all have the relative anonymity of living in the GTA.
Third, the list also needs to be expanded to truly reflect the spending of public sector money on compensation. A case in point, universities must report all of their employees making over $100,000 because they are a public sector agency but it remains that universities in Ontario today only directly get between 40 and 50 percent of their funding from the Ontario taxpayer. The rest is own source revenue generation and tuition and while you can argue that many Ontario students get loans or even free tuition from the taxpayer that still does not sum up the public sector funding share to 100 percent. University professors do not get 100 percent of their salaries from the Ontario taxpayer and yet 100 percent of their salary is reported. On the other hand, physicians who are nearly 100 percent taxpayer funded are not on the list (unless they are directly salaried or employed by a public agency) because they are independent contractors. Two points here: 1) a taxpayer dollar is a taxpayer dollar no matter how it is spent and 2) I'm surprised universities have not been more enterprising in redefining how their faculty are paid thereby removing large numbers of them from the list.
So, there you have it. I think the list released under the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act is important and part of the mechanism of accountability and democracy in government. However, by focusing only on salaried employees of public sector agencies and government making over $100,000 a year misses the point as to how large the public sector actually is when it comes to employment and the spending of taxpayer dollars. The list should be expanded. As the song goes, the task of filling in the names I'd rather leave to you.
