It is municipal budget season in Ontario and many municipal ratepayers across the province are waking up to projections of fairly large tax increases as a result of inflationary pressure. It is interesting that when municipal finance officers talk about inflation they invariably mention the effects of the war in Ukraine. I must admit, I would be interested in an explanation by a municipal CAO as to how the war in Ukraine has directly impacted a municipal budget in Thunder Bay or Sudbury. Nevertheless, we should move on to the main event here.
When it comes to Ontario’s municipal sector, getting a handle on the numbers can be a challenging and complicated endeavor. Indeed, it has already been noted by at least one think tank that municipal budgets in Canada are not user friendly and are quite difficult for the average citizen to understand. In the case of Ontario municipal budgetary information, there are standardized reporting templates or Financial Information Returns that are available through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and there is annual data for each municipality but the assorted excel spreadsheets with multiple sheets and windows are not terribly user friendly.
And then there is the case of trying to get a handle on employment numbers – again not a very transparent process. There is your core municipal employment in terms of administration and staff which can then be augmented by protection services such as fire, employment and paramedics and then there are some municipalities with other services such as long-term care. Thunder Bay is a classic example of the difficulties in getting estimates as they are presented as Full Time Equivalents or FTEs with police reported separately and the time series not terribly extensive even when you can track them down. And of course, given the idiosyncrasies of each municipality, forget about inter municipal comparisons.
In the end, trying to get data on municipal employment in any Ontario municipality is exceedingly difficult and so one is often forced to improvise. One avenue worth pursuing is not going directly to municipalities but the provincial government which as a result of its public sector disclosure act collects data on Ontario public sector employees making more than $100,000. This allows one to at least get a consistent comparative handle on municipal employees across Ontario municipalities albeit only those earning over $100,000.
Figure 1 presents the number of municipal employees earning $100,000 or more for the five major northern Ontario cities – Thunder Bay, Timmins, Greater Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay – for the period 2017 to 2021. The number of employees making over $100,000 – let’s call them Listers – grew in all five of these cities over time with a particularly noticeable bump in 2020. For example, in Thunder Bay, there were 417 municipal Listers in 2017 and this rose to 452 by 2019 and then jumped to 558 in 2020 before declining slightly to 547 in 2021. A similar pattern was observed for Greater Sudbury and to a lesser extent in the other three cities.
Interestingly enough, in 2021, Thunder Bay had the most municipal Listers at 547 followed by Sudbury at 540, then the Sault at 246, North Bay at 187 and finally Timmins at 142. This ranking roughly parallels population size with the exception that based on population, one would expect Sudbury to exceed Thunder Bay. Sudbury’s population is about 60 percent more than Thunder Bay but in 2021 Thunder Bay had practically the same number of employees making over $100,000. Indeed, one can make an additional number of comparisons from the data – the total wage and salary bill in 2021 for Listers, in each municipality, the average salary per Lister and the per capita cost of Listers in each municipality (constructed by dividing the total wage and salary bill for those making more than $100,00 by the municipality’s population). These are presented in Figures 2 to 4.
Figure 2 ranks the total wage and salary bill for municipal listers and shows the total in 2021 was largest for Thunder Bay at $69.6 million (down slightly from $70.9 million in 2020 but up substantially from 2019 at $54.7 million) and the smallest for Timmins at $17.4 million. Given the difference sin municipal population size, the totals needs to be supplement with adjustments for employment size or population.
Figure 3 ranks the municipalities by the average salary per municipal lister and they range from $135,557 for North Bay (Thunder Bay is second at $127,171) to a low of $122,188 for Timmins. Figure 4 is the most interesting however as it takes the total wage and salary bill for Listers in each municipality and divides by the population of the municipality to present a per capita cost. The per capita cost of Listers was highest in Thunder Bay at $628 per capita and lowest in Greater Sudbury at $403 per capita.
The Thunder Bay numbers are worth drilling down into further given that adjusted for population, they definitely standout from the other municipalities. That will be a future post.
