Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn believes that allowing Ontario provincial taxpayers to see a list of all public sector employees who make more than $100,000 a year isn’t a nod to basic accountability and open, transparent government, but rather a “transparently political attack on unionized civil servants and other public sector employees.”
He calls it “salary pornography“:
“Society normally frowns on peep shows and public voyeurism. Except in Ontario, where it’s open season on public servants’ private lives. Log on to any computer, draw the drapes and pore through the perverse pleasures of the now notorious ‘sunshine list.’
“It claims to shed light on the darkest corners of the provincial bureaucracy. In reality, it stokes vilification and humiliation of frontline public servants….”
Have Ontario taxpayers no sense of decency?
What a drama queen.
Why stop there? How about revealing the identities of freeloading subsidized farmers who make in excess of $100,000.00 a year? Works for me. How about you, hypocrites?
I bet he has no problem “exposing” over paid CEOs though! If nothing else, the left is littered with hypocrites! 🙂
@Phil, I have no problem agreeing with you on perhaps this point only. Anyone getting subsidies from the government, at any level, can be included in that list. But I would add that it should be $100,000 of profit where private businesses are concerned, and that would include farmers, who are independent business persons. Still and all, I am opposed to government hand outs for all. Stop money to all interest groups, all grants to everyone, no business grants and subsidies, nada. Let them sink or swim on their own.
Regg Cohn is wrong; these salaries are not private; they were not earned as private businessmen. It’s public money and therefore, it must be transparent.
Phil – as noted by Dwayne, accountability is required when the money used is from the taxpayers – but, I disagree that subsidies and grants should be stopped. And what’s wrong with a farmer earning over 100,000? There are almost no nations in the world where farming is unsubsidized – which can be anything from irrigation subsidies, to export and import tariffs.
Canada’s dairy farmers, heavily located in Quebec, are a case in point – and I certainly agree with stopping their preferential treatment, but, since Quebec self-defines itself as Untouchable, that’s not going to happen.
But not all activities of a society are sustainable in a sales environment – such as medical and scientific research, such as publications of books, music; community centres; senior and children’s services and so on. So, grants from the taxpayer to these agencies are, in my view, a vital part of a society.
“Have Ontario taxpayers no sense of decency?”. I can assure you that I do not when it comes to MY money.
This is offensive to my sexual preference. Nothing makes my blood flow faster than looking up people’s salaries. It’s a bit offensive for him to make fun of that – it would be like saying homosexuality is wrong.
If they are on the public dole then I have no problem as a taxpayer seeing what we are paying them. if they work in private industry it is absolutely none of my business…Pretty straight forward if you ask me….But then again these people that complain about their neighbors knowing what they earn have never understood that their neighbors actually pay their salary’s.
IMO, the massive salaries paid to hospital administrators are criminal. Only the best cardiac surgeons get up to the $710,000/year figure and they put in a hell of a lot more hours than hospital administrators. The whole class of hospital administrators could be wiped out by a new virus and the only difference it would make in terms of how hospitals run is that things would operate with greater efficiency.
In BC doctors have had their MSP billings printed annually in the “Blue book” which seems to be favored reading material of journalists and patients. Often it is from patients that I find out how much I’ve billed the last year when I get asked questions of why Dr. X, who was the patients former doctor who missed the disease I diagnosed in the patient bills 3 times more than I do. Usually they can’t understand my answer that some doctors are specialists at milking the socialized medical system rather than practicing good medicine.
One should find out which hospitals the nurses who make more than $100,000/year work at and fire the highly paid administrators of those hospitals as that means they are incompetent at their jobs. Either that, or there is a scam going on where nurses take turns in being “sick” so others can get overtime.
What an asshat! It’s public information paid for by tax payers that have a right to know how there money is wasted, er I mean spent.
For those in Mordor:
http://www.illinoisloop.org/salary.html
or
http://www.familytaxpayers.org/salary.php
^This enabled me to discover my sister in law that constantly cries poor makes more, substantially more than I do and for only 9 months of work.
OK, taxpayers…here’s some Saskatchewan “disclosure” from a taxpayer who is also on the public service payroll.
As of February 2012, average hourly wage in Sask, according to Stats Canada, is $23.62 for employees age 15 and over. To date, my hourly is $24.62 and I am at the top of a classification that is over 1/3 into the Union classification levels. Any further opportunity for wage increases, beyond those acquired through contract settlement, would require me to obtain further formal education. This is not a complaint…we all need to shut the F#$% up and live with the choices we make…that’s my philosophy!
My point is, as public servant, I believe it is my duty to report any remuneration that I receive from taxpayers and anybody who thinks differently is probably breathing their own methane!
And what’s wrong with a farmer earning over 100,000?
Not a thing. What’s wrong with a wage earner making $100,00.00?
I believe it is my duty to report any remuneration that I receive from taxpayers
Now let’s hear from biffy, bartinky, kulak and the rest.
So, grants from the taxpayer to these agencies are, in my view, a vital part of a society.
Why ET…who would’ve thunk you are in actuality a Trudeapian Liberal.
phil
How deceptive of you….
A farmer who grosses $100,000 may have a net (-) profit…..
A farmers gross is not anywhere comparable to a snivellel servant’s gross….
Me thinks hes trying to hide something. That or frightened someone may take his pay away for a dumb job that he will swear is indispensable but didn’t exist 10 years ago. In my experience working for the municipal government. The more stupidly liberal you are. With less work than others. The more pay you get. Usually the person pushing papers, has minimal education or more important life experience. Has never really worked labor in their life. Holds up Micky Mouse courses as proof of leadership. In reality no one considers them leader nor competent. Just brown nosing, Union loving metro-sexual cranks.
Where do farmers get to sit around and make 100,000 dollars and how do I get my farm.
Crane and dozer operators make that here in Alberta, so what’s the deal?
phil you deadbeat,as I’ve told you before,BUY A FARM! You are always comparing people with zero invested with those that have to live on whats left after the expenses of running a business are paid.Govt employies that pay nothing for their job,cant get fired,then retire with a pension and pay NO income tax.No federal tax if federal employies and no provincial tax if provincial employies.Someday that will get thru to you and other thick heads that govt employies dont pay tax.They are PAID with tax from non govt employies.
Google Saskatchewan Payee Disclosure Report. It lists the public employees and companies who were paid more than $50K.
To phil and others of his ilk; The day is not far away when govt employies will have to BID for and BUY their jobs.A $100,000 dollar a year job,with a pension should be worth well over a $1,000,000 and maybe more in an open market bidding system considering the job security and perks. Striking with the risk of dismissal would not be an option.
spike 1
“and pay NO income tax.No federal tax if federal employies and no provincial tax if provincial employies.Someday that will get thru to you and other thick heads that govt employies dont pay tax.”
Yep. Too thick. I must have missed that day in my advanced tax course. If they make 90 grand and they only take home 60 grand then …? Oh forget it, I’m too thick to ever understand.
[quote]Why are we buying into the fear that these CEOs would be poached, and that their hospitals would crumble in their wake?[/quote] Cohn
Yes! That is the problem in a nut shell, the Civil service “CEO” should be a LAST resort job…Temp without a pension (Spike has a good idea, bid on the Job to get experience; only )
The max salary for a Hospital Administration should not exceed the wages of a low level manager, or the manager in the Corporation of the building Janitorial Services.
I have always respected the ability of Union Engineers and the value of good management of the use of authorized Over-time. It is my opinion that OT is abused, by incompetent Management..Nurses working REGULAR OT all the time, it is the Manager that MUST be fired
I guess the columnist Cohn doesn’t appreciate people waking up and realizing they’re not mushrooms.
Re grants and subsidies: phase them out if necessary, but get rid of them.
Phil:
I make over $10K. But its my company; I don’t rely on handouts from government or taxpayers (the same thing). But I only pay myself after I pay my employees…in the event that there is nothing left after I pay them, I get nothing.
No worries. That is capitalism. It works!
And of course what you seem oblivious to is the fact that I have over $400K of MY OWN MONEY invested in my company. If it had failed, my money would have disappeared. That’s capitalism. And it works!
Do us all a favour and invest in even an online course in basic economics.
Or alternatively, invest some of your own money in progressive socially-responsible enterprises…I hear that the market for unicorn farts is beginning to take off.
Phil a funny thing just happened.
I was about to type a rude reply to you (contrary to the semi-official SDA public decision that we don’t stoop to that level.)
REM cued on the radio,
“What’s the frequency Kenneth”
I just thought about you and laughed.
dwight
I am on the provincial sunshine list. I am about to head off for work for a 12 hour shift. For the next two months I will work 12 hour day/ night shifts 60 hours a week, because one of our reactors is down for its 18 monthly maintenance I am a maintenance tech at a nuclear power plant. If I worked at Bruce Power, which is owned by OPG but leased to a private operator, instead of OPG, I would make even more. If I worked in the oil fields, which is probably where my skill set would take me if I wasn’t were I was I would make even more. Am I complaining about how much I make? No i am happy about the fact that I don’t have to commute from Ontario to Fort Mac like some of my friends do. I am fairly paid for what I do compared to the private sector equivalent. This is not the case with all government workers. If OPG got sold tomorrow my pay and working conditions wouldn’t likely change – as witnessed by the fact that guys at Bruce power make more than me.
Now let’s hear from biffy, bartinky, kulak and the rest.
How could I forget welfare bum spike. Show us the money, spike.
Give it up Phil, what’s your ‘gvmt stake?
You’re not a “front line” bureaucrat I can smell that out from BC.
I’ll put my Docs on the line if you will…
And even the premise of his metaphor is wrong:
Does society REALLY “frown on peep shows”? Is pR0n not ubiquitous these days?
Do these people ever have an original and/or reality based thought?
I haven’t peeped this… but I think it would be helpful if the taxpayers of Ontario knew how much they were on the hook, regarding these civil servants unfunded pension scheme as well.
Seeing as it’s all funded by the private sector.
Did I just just call a “junk” comparison battle?
(best I can say without being “R” rated.)
Easy for me, Alberta beef in the boxer briefs.
dwright
I’m on that list. Its a good thing.
This isn’t complicated……..
Phil there are no free market farmers. If the government would get rid of some of the stupid heavy handed regulation and dang multi level bureaucrats that chose the winners and losers, that seem to live to bedevil the farmer life then i could see subsidies going. Until you can get government, spca out of the cow pasture and into the office you gotta learn it live with it.
The only issue I have is it should be base pay.
If you took all those whose base pay wouldn’t qualify them for the list but are in there because of OT then the list would be mostly administrative/management types.
Does he moonlight for CBC? Perhaps that explains why he’s aghast that public servant’s salaries are being made public?
Phil, it appears you’ve been mis-guided little fella, I think I have received about 2200 over 36 years. I might have missed all the gravy you yodel about, should’ve been an auto worker eh Phil, or lived on welfare, why have I spent all these years paying for land, with only the sale of that land for a pension. Should have been a public servant, big pension slack hours, Phil knows how to live.
If tax fraud wasn’t so rampant in Canada, some of you might have an argument. As it is, look around you, you might be the only one in the room actually paying tax. And that includes employees AND employers. Most of you use far more tax-paid services than you pay for. Why do you think there’s a deficit? I said it once before and I’ll say it again: the federal govt is the larges single unrecoverable lender to small business in Canada through unpaid source deductions and GST withholdings, amounting to billions in tax fraud.
If you don’t think civil servants are paid a fair wage for the work they do, maybe its you who is dragging everybody down, by working for a wage that can’t sustain you, then going broke and falling back on social services to bail you out… The man who simply leans on a shovel ultimately get paid tax money regardless, either as a civil servant or as a fired private sector employee because he’s lazy.
There is a cost of living to Canadian society that everyone needs to acquire money for. A service based economy means more old money gets recycled. Yes, you can reduce public sector wages, and along with it will go the services. You might not want the services provided, but your neighbour most certainly does.
For those of you in the trades, are you working as a sub-con? Then the likelihood is you and your contractor are not paying your fair share. A fact that becomes evident when you show up looking for EI and discover you’re ineligible because you didn’t pay into it… Oh, well.
Cohn’s argument, which none of you get, is about outing salaries by individual, not by job. Keeping track of the money is important, but all the public needs to know is what jobs get paid what amount and how many of them are there. The details of who fills them is irrelevent to the accounting. The recent ORNGE scandal in Untario details more Liberal mismanagement on a scale, that makes bitching over wages regular civil servants make ridiculous.
“Unfunded” pension liabilities (ask the govt some time why they’re unfunded, or more specifically, ask them what they did with the money collected for them. Oh, that’s right, the supreme court said they didn’t have to explain that.
The Federal unfunded liability is estimated at 2B. Hmm, you can recover half that by cutting off the CBC 1B annual subsidy….
And Spike, dude, you STILL don’t understand the money supply and how the economy operates. Civil servants, especially those who work in value-added services, pay and earn exactly the same way as everybody else. Every product has an input cost. EVERY PRODUCT, including govt services, and ebvery product has an output value. Its been a very long time since economies were based solely on new production (ie, from “nothing”), if they ever were.
Comparison between farmers and snivel servants would work if the bean counters had to buy their own computers, paper, vehicles, gasoline, health insurance, protective clothing etc.
Last I ch3cked, tractors cost a lot.
[i]Cohn’s argument, which none of you get, is about outing salaries by individual, not by job.[/i]
Cohn says nothing of the sort. He mainly laments that the cutoff figure isn’t adjusted for inflation.
If they had a list of farmers making over $100,000 profit annually, it would be a pretty small list. The list would consist mostly of dead or retiring farmers selling all their assets.
phil asks: “Not a thing. What’s wrong with a wage earner making $100,00.00?”
They aren’t “wage earners”, pill. They’re -government- employees. They are a -cost- to society. They do not generate wealth, they consume it. Surely even you can understand that distinction.
The problem with them getting over $100k is that its too much money for the results they produce. In the private sector you have to seriously work your butt to the bone to generate $100k in after-cost profit. Do middle managers in the Ontario government have to produce results like that to earn $100k? No, they just have to have a Masters in English Lit and live long enough.
In aggregate the governments of this country consumes more money than the country creates. That’s too much. The best paying jobs in this country these days are government jobs. That’s wrong, and its the reason this country is in trouble.
minuteman wrote —
I am on the provincial sunshine list. … I am a maintenance tech at a nuclear power plant.
Thanks for helping to keep the lights on! I appreciate it.
Reworking Loki’s comment from an educator’s viewpoint: IMO, the massive salaries paid to school board administrators are criminal. . . . the best teachers put in a hell of a lot more hours than board administrators. The whole class of . . . administrators could be wiped out by a new virus and the only difference it would make in terms of how schools run is that things would operate with greater efficiency. You bet!
As I’ve said many times, if a school has a good office administrator—they used to be called secretaries—the principals and VPs’ offices could be staffed by monkeys and things would be just fine: maybe even better. Administrators are politicians, who are expected to micromanage these days: many of them seriously interfere with teachers’ ability to actually teach a sound curriculum. A lot of teachers, in effect, close their classroom doors and stay as far away from the office as possible. That works!
I believe that even some teachers would be making over $100 000/yr these days: certainly the principals and VPs do. The salaries of the superintendents—like principals and VPs, often altogether mediocre teachers and the biggest yes-people going—are obscene, as is the salary of any director. In most cases, these people are politicians and panderers, not educators.
So, not connected to performance in any way, there would be thousands of “educators” making salaries over $100 000/yr. As the taxpayers foot the bill, it’s definitely their business to know what they’re forking out. (It’s not called The Star for nothing: those people live on another planet!)
Typical Star Presstitute – selling public sector exess as private business. Normally I’d say people’s salaries are none of our business but seeing how the government compiles and publishes private sector salaries I think its fair to see the same from the public sector.
The accountability will come when private sector administrators, managers and professionals see the vast discrepancy in the salaries of their public sector counter parts. I bet the prospect of outting public secter salary excess has these unionized wage gluttons getting a with of boiling tar and torches. The villagers are ready to storm the castle.
There should be a list of welfare recipients while they’re at it. All freeloaders riding on the taxpayer gravy train should be exposed. If there was even a minute trace of shame associated taking taxpayer monies, I think a whole lot less would do so.
Skip said: “For those of you in the trades, are you working as a sub-con? Then the likelihood is you and your contractor are not paying your fair share.”
Skip, in a country as obscenely over-taxed as Canada, the phrase “not paying your fair share” acquires the quality of fighting words. Rest assured construction subs are getting sheared as close as everybody else, just in different places.
I will grant that 90% or better of non-union construction is done under-the-table, on a cash basis and the government never sees a dime of it. Which, quite frankly, is entirely reasonable and completely their own fault.
Anyone I know who’s tried to “go legit” and do everything by the book over the last 30 years has A) gone nearly crazy trying to deal with the sheer mass of paperwork, and B) gone broke, because they can’t get the jobs if their bids include the cost of taxes and complying with regulations, and they can’t make the bids anyway because they’re busy filling out government paperwork.
That’s why we even have sub-contractors in construction. Because it costs -at least- $35k to employ a guy who you pay $20k. Fifteen grand worth of extra taxes and cost to comply with regs and paperwork (which usually is done by another employee). Otherwise everybody would just be casual labor employees of a proper construction company, instead of the crazy web of tiny one-man outfits that make building anything here such a huge pain in the @ss.
As to big construction like roads and bridges and gas pipe etc, why do you think all the construction companies in Quebec for example are crooked? Because they -have- to be crooked, duh. If you don’t bribe and undercut and cheat and lie, you go broke. Survival of the fittest favors the Mob. Just another unintended consequence of central planed socialism.
You said this here: “Yes, you can reduce public sector wages, and along with it will go the services. You might not want the services provided, but your neighbour most certainly does.”
But then you said: “The recent ORNGE scandal in Untario details more Liberal mismanagement on a scale, that makes bitching over wages regular civil servants make ridiculous.”
See, the actual problem isn’t the individual civil servants… EXCEPT WHEN IT IS. So if Mr. X and Mr. Y have been pulling down six figures for the last ten years managing the Department of Paper Clips, and then we “discover” one day that they -also- own a company that’s been billing THEIR DEPARTMENT a million bucks a year, for services that are at best dubious… I think that’s my business. I should be able to find that out.
The real problem of course is not one of mere oversight, but of scale. There’s simply too many employees and too much money being spent for the social goods government “produces” here in Canada. The simple fact is that if you make a big pile of money somewhere, people come with buckets and carry it away. Sticky fingers never rest.
Ontario can’t even run a fricking ambulance service properly, how much more evidence does one need? So Ontario shouldn’t be running it, should they? And all those clowns making over $100k in that department of the Ontario government, suddenly exactly who they are is a matter of public concern, isn’t it?
Tax cuts now please.
Scar; If a govt employee makes $90,000a year and takes home $60,000 he isnt paying tax to the govt,he is only giving some BACK as the govt gave him the money in the first place.The govt does NOT make new wealth,only the private sector generates new wealth.All socialist countries find that out sooner or later.The USSR had NO income tax as everyone worked for the govt.
Civil servants are parasites, they don’t do anything but recycle our hard earned money.
Its been a very long time since economies were based solely on new production (ie, from “nothing”), if they ever were.
Talk about living in never never land. Ever hear of the broken window fallacy? You know, how fixing vandalized broken windows does not add wealth.