Should threshold of $100,00 be revised to $180,000?
Mayors in small Ontario municipalities are calling for an overhaul of the province’s Sunshine List system, which mandates the public disclosure of employees earning $100,000 or more annually.
Introduced in 1996 under the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, the reporting threshold has remained unchanged for nearly three decades, despite significant inflation.
Critics now argue that this salary cap no longer reflects current economic realities, placing an unfair burden on smaller communities.
Had that figure been adjusted for inflation, $100,000 would now equate to around $180,000, says Bob Mullin, the mayor of Stirling-Rawdon, a township of 5,000 residents located northwest of Belleville, in a CBC report.
That’s “a huge difference," he said.
Despite rising living costs, the Sunshine List threshold remains fixed at $100,000, leaving municipalities like Stirling-Rawdon obligated to publicly disclose the salaries of employees who meet this outdated benchmark.
Invasion of privacy with salary disclosure
Mullin argues that in smaller communities, this disclosure borders on an invasion of privacy, as residents know each other well.
"Everybody knows who they are," he said in the CBC report, referring to the small number of locals whose salaries are made public each year.
Stirling-Rawdon's township council recently called on Premier Doug Ford's government to update the act so that the inflation rate is applied each year.
Earlier this year, Ontario released its annual Sunshine List of the top-paid employees in the public sector. Based on their earnings from last year, more than 300,500 public servants made it to the esteemed list for 2023 who earned more than $100,000 — and the top 10 HR executives easily made more than $300,000.
Frances Smith, the mayor of Central Frontenac, emphasized the difficulty of explaining to seniors on fixed incomes why $100,000 is no longer a substantial figure.
"It's hard for somebody in their 70s or 80s to realize that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money these days," Smith said in the CBC report, highlighting the generational divide in understanding the impact of inflation on wages.
Sunshine List a concern amid labour shortages
Beyond concerns about privacy, the current system puts small municipalities at a competitive disadvantage. Mullin noted that private employers, and even other municipalities, can easily access public sector salary information, potentially poaching employees by offering better perks or wages.
"[It] makes it pretty easy to say, 'Come to us. We’ll give you this little perk,'" Mullin explained in the CBC report, pointing to the challenges smaller communities face in retaining staff amidst a labour shortage. With limited resources, smaller townships already struggle to fill key positions, and the public nature of their salary data only exacerbates the issue.
Smith echoed these concerns, stating that the Sunshine List creates additional challenges for communities like hers that are already working with limited staff and resources.
"When you have something like this that we think is kind of frivolous, it just doesn’t sit right," she said.
Despite the call for change, Ontario is not considering a change to the threshold, according to the CBC report.
Minister Caroline Mulroney, president of Ontario’s treasury board, defended the current threshold, noting that $100,000 is still "a lot of money" for many Ontario families.
Maintaining the threshold “allows taxpayers to do year-over-year comparisons and makes Ontario’s public sector more transparent and accountable," she said in a statement to CBC, adding that the government is not considering any adjustments.
