The City of Ottawa’s trying to downplay the fact that 6,300 employees are on the annual ‘Sunshine List.’
The annual “Sunshine List” of public servants in Ontario who earned more than $100,000 in 2024 was released recently, providing the hoi polloi an opportunity to kick ourselves for not getting executive positions with Ontario Power Generation or becoming radiologists at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
The list, which is actually called the Public Sector Salary Disclosure, includes employees of organizations that received public funding from the province. The act requiring the disclosure of that information has been in effect since 1996.
Now, I’m not here to quarrel with the salaries of some of the top bread-winners at the City of Ottawa (although the earnings of some police officers who aren’t the chief, deputy chiefs or superintendents deserve a good explanation). City manager Wendy Stephanson’s list-topping salary of slightly more than $450,000, for example, probably seems an ungodly amount to most mortals. But it’s less than what Toronto’s city manager makes and more than Vaughan’s, so perhaps that’s simply the going rate. Kudos to the kindergartener who dreams of one day becoming a city manager rather than a paleontologist.
What is offensive, however, is the city’s tone-deaf response in defending the fact that the list includes more than 6,300 of its employees, out of a workforce that, according to city hall, numbers about 17,000. It’s as though it’s saying there’s nothing to see here, folks — just move along, we can explain it all away.
Quickly, here are some of the salient numbers: There are 6,313 city employees on the list. The average salary of those city employees is a little more than $127,000.
The Evening Citizen
On the day the province released the list, Pamela LeMaistre, Ottawa’s chief human resources officer, sent a memo to city council and department heads, ostensibly to provide context to those numbers. It’s an exercise the city performs each year.
The memo includes these facts: Forty-four per cent of the city workers on the list were first responders; many people on the list had base salaries under $100,000 but made the list because of such factors as overtime or retroactive payments; the list includes Elected Officials (her caps); and the list’s $100,000 threshold has never been updated to account for inflation. If it had been, the memo states, the basement for reporting salaries publicly would now be almost $180,000, meaning … drum roll … that only 250 city employees would be on it.
The note also says that the provincial act prevents the city from revealing more information about the salaries and benefits, in what reads like a not-quite exculpatory game of peek-a-boo.
The memo, of course, fails to address such questions as why, if so much of the city’s payroll goes to overtime as is implied, haven’t officials found ways to eliminate that, rather than simply shrugging? The memo also sounds like the city is saying “Hey, some of these people only really made $95,000! It’s not like it’s champagne and caviar for everyone, you know.” Tell that to your Walmart greeter.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure why the memo mentions the plethora of first responders — because they’re indispensable? — or the Elected Officials, unless to perhaps remind the latter that they’re on the list, so best not to make it an issue? We pay councillors just under $120,000 each, a bargain when you consider the long hours most put in. (Also, a salary that’s below what 3,262 other city employees make.)
The memo is correct that the baseline amount has remained unchanged for almost three decades, the implication being that this state of affairs may lead to unfair comparisons. But making that argument is almost just as unfair. After all, it misses an important point: In Ottawa, the median individual income is $50,000 (or it was in 2020, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has published figures). That means that more than 400,000 working Ottawans earned less than $50,000 apiece. More than 80 per cent, or nearly 660,000, made less than $100,000.
So cavalierly downplaying the Sunshine list and the thousands of city employees on it, especially at a time when many residents are struggling to make ends meet, is insensitive, a snub of those thousands of Ottawa workers for whom the figure is almost an aspirational fairy tale.
The salaries of the city employees on that list total more than $800 million — a cost taxpayers bear. They deserve better than to be told there’s nothing to see here.
