Derek Fildebrandt
Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Employers know how much their employees earn in salaries, wages and benefits. How else could they properly manage their business and make important business decisions?
Yet, somehow, it is controversial among some politicians and government employees when the employers paying their salaries – taxpayers – want to know how much they are making? Why would some politicians and government employees fight against the right of their bosses to know how much they make?
Right now, Canadians across the country are demanding more openness from government, and they aren’t asking nicely.
Alberta’s Conservative-turned-Independent MP, Brent Rathgeber started the ball rolling very modestly in Ottawa with his private member’s bill to disclose government salaries above $188,000. For reasons that they have yet to explain to the public, the PMO orchestrated a gutting of the bill without any debate. Mr. Rathgeber quit the Conservative caucus later that day.
But Rathgeber continues to fight for his bill as an independent and it enjoys significant support among some Conservative backbenchers and most members of the opposition.
In Alberta, taxpayers demanded to know how much Premiers Redford’s former chief of staff had been paid out in severance when he left her service. The government refused to disclose the information, even though it was legally required to under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) argued that this kind of information should not have to be fought for with commissioners or in the courts, but that as the employer, taxpayers should be able to access this information without a team of lawyers. The CTF pushed for a proactively disclosed list of the salaries, wages, employer pension contributions, cash benefits and severance paid to all government employers making $100,000 or more, otherwise known as, a “sunshine list.”
To the surprise of many, the government did just this. Alberta’s new sunshine list rules are the most comprehensive government employee compensation disclosure in the country, and will be a model for others to follow.
This has the potential to play a hugely important role for accountability purposes, but also for monitoring government employee costs more broadly.
Ontario has had a sunshine list since the mid-1990s, although it is limited to just salaries and wages, excluding all other compensation. It showed, for example, several Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) toll both attendees making more than $100,000, as did more than 1,400 other TTC employees.
Beyond individual examples, sunshine lists also allow taxpayers to track general trends in government employee compensation. In Ontario, the number of employees making more than $100,000 a year increased by 11 per cent in just the past year. Since 2009, the list has grown by 39 per cent.
However, it is precisely this growth in Ontario that has led some sunshine list critics to argue that that disclosure fuels a growth in spending. The argument goes that employees, now able to see what their counter-parts are making, will be jealous and demand more money.
That government employees have made out like bandits in Ontario is hard to disagree with. According to Statistics Canada, between 2008 and 2012, employees in that province have seen their weekly earnings go up by an incredible 20.8%. This, during a time when workers in the private sector were just happy to have jobs.
But is Ontario’s sunshine list to blame for this? Did disclosure really fuel this explosion in government pay cheques?
The same Statistics Canada data also shows that taken together, jurisdictions with sunshine lists (British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) saw an average pay cheque increase of 12.3% over these five years. Provinces with no sunshine list (Alberta, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island), saw an average increase of 13.7%.
This means that provinces with no sunshine lists saw raises larger than provinces that had them.
The most likely explanation for Ontario’s government bonanza isn’t that they disclose salaries, but that that province has had three terms of Dalton McGuinty at the helm, whose primary base of political support was the very government employees which he treated so generously.
Even if disclosing government employee salaries and other benefits made no difference in the costs, taxpayers still have the moral right to know how their money is being spent on their employees. And, sometimes they need to be reminded, that we are the boss.