Governments at all levels need to find better ways to shed light on the cost and effectiveness of public sector workers.KeithBinns/AFP/Getty Images
When Ontario’s Sunshine List was first introduced in 1996, it was meant to make the public sector more open and accountable to taxpayers, and to serve as a check on payroll spending.
Three decades on, those annual salary disclosures in Ontario and other provinces have devolved into data dumps that shed little light. Transparency around public sector staffing is crucial, given the costs make up a massive chunk of government spending. Governments at all levels need to find better ways to shed light on the cost and effectiveness of public sector workers.
As it stands now, the release of Ontario’s annual list is largely a pointless exercise in financial voyeurism, as curious friends, neighbours and colleagues search for people they know. Back in 1996, the $100,000 cutoff ensured that only high earners were in the spotlight, and just 4,576 names appeared.
The current list has 404,922 people, many of them in decidedly middle-class jobs, such as teachers, police officers and nurses. Had the cutoff been indexed to inflation, it would be $185,000 in 2025 dollars. Some other provinces’ cutoffs are even lower, with B.C.’s starting at $75,000 and Manitoba’s at $85,000. It’s important to know what people in leadership roles are earning, but the current system focuses attention on regular workers who have little decision making power.
Opinion: We need a national Sunshine list, publicizing salaries of individual federal workers
If the aim of these disclosures was to keep salaries down, there’s not much evidence it has worked. Research on the topic is mixed, but it’s common for public service workers to use information on their colleagues’ salaries to lobby for increases. Consider that several provinces, including Ontario, brought in pay transparency laws requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in job ads, selling them as tools to help workers.
While there is some evidence that salary disclosure lists can help reduce the wage gap between men and women, research also shows the information can reduce morale for workers who are paid below average.
Governments shouldn’t scrap salary disclosure lists, but they should make them more meaningful. While disclosures for high-earning decision makers are useful, positions at lower levels can be aggregated without names, showing how many workers of each type are in certain salary bands. The data should be specific, detailing the types of duties performed, and consistent, so year-over-year comparisons can be made. It should be easy to see if a certain department had a big jump in senior administrative staff, for example.
Did senior staff receive performance pay – and why? How much overtime did staff clock in? How many sick days did they take, and did they “bank” sick days they didn’t take? What is the cost of benefits and pensions? How many new positions were created, and what kind of roles are they? And, most crucially: How do these stats compare with similar private-sector organizations? All of these answers should be made readily available.
In addition to staffing metrics, the public deserves better accountability around what these groups of workers actually accomplish and if service standards are being met. While auditor generals provide a valuable check on spending, more can be done to detail if programs are achieving their goals.
Some federal government departments make internal audits public, but David McLaughlin, a past CEO of the Institute on Governance, points out that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada used to average five internal program audits per year to assess and improve effectiveness. Since 2019, it has never done more than one per year. More can be done to show what is working, and what isn’t.
Jocelyne Bourgon, who led the federal public service in the 1990s, has pointed to the Clerk of the Privy Council’s mandatory annual report on the state of the public service as a useful example. It is currently used as a highlight reel to showcase successes, she says, but could become more robust, serving as an ongoing fitness check tracking the health of the public service. She points to the Whitehall Monitor, an unofficial annual report on the British public service by the Institute for Government, an independent think tank, as a model. The report brings together scattered public data to create a comprehensive report on changes in the public service.
This is the real sunshine we need to shed light on Canada’s public sector.