A few years ago when the Commonwealth Games were hosted in Delhi, the city hired security guards but only paid them a measly $10 per day. To be fair, the security guards were langur monkeys, and their $10 was paid out in bananas. The monkeys were stationed around the arenas to keep feral dogs and snakes away.
The pay might have been meager, but at least the Commonwealth Games were open and honest about the salary and had no problems disclosing the monkey money, which is more than can be said for many towns and cities across Ontario.
A story published by the CBC last week was headlined, ‘Ontario's Sunshine List system is now unfair to small towns’ and I gotta tell ya, this article drives me bananas, no offense to the langur monkey security guards.
The thrust of the article is that the annual sunshine list, which compels municipalities in Ontario to publicly disclose the salaries of employees earning $100,000 or higher, is somehow “unfair” for a variety of reasons, but primarily because, apparently, earning that much money is not even noteworthy anymore.
The mayor of Central Frontenac claimed that what people don’t understand is, “$100,000 isn’t a lot of money these days.”
Wow, I guess I didn’t realize that Central Frontenac is a magical place where money grows on trees and the streets are paved with diamonds and gold. Must be nice to live in a place where being in the top tax bracket and earning a six figure salary “isn’t a lot of money.”
For the rest of us brokies who don’t live in Central Frontenac, the salary distribution certainly looks a lot different. According to Statistics Canada, the bottom 90 per cent of Canadians earn an average annual salary of $28,000. Sure looks to me like 90 per cent of Canadians would consider a $100,000 salary to be a lot of money.
Setting aside the outright insanity of calling a six figure salary “not a lot of money” for a moment, let’s look at the other argument from this hack article, which is that publicly disclosing salaries makes it hard to retain “the best” talent.
“The current system is also unfair because private employers … get to see what the Township offers in salaries,” which according to this article, means city hall employees get poached by private sector companies who look at the sunshine list and just offer higher salaries.
To which I would say: good. Let them go. That’s exactly how the system is supposed to work. Going to the private sector to earn a higher salary is a good thing, that’s sorta the cornerstone of how a functioning economic system is designed to operate.
There is always someone out there willing to take that job at City Hall
When someone gets “poached” by the private sector, just replace them with a new person at City Hall. If that person gets “poached” then replace them too. Think about it, this pattern can’t go on forever, there isn’t an infinite supply of private sector jobs out there, endlessly stealing City Hall employees until the end of time. There is always someone out there willing to take that job at City Hall. When a City Hall job opens up, they get hundreds and hundreds of job applications.
And don’t give me any malarkey about how you have to pay the City CAO some absurd $300,000 salary in order to get “the best talent” because that’s pure fantasy. There exists a person who will do the CAO job for $80,000 and do it perfectly well.
Every single year when the sunshine list is published, a bunch of whiny out-of-touch elites complain that it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since 1996 so the threshold should be lifted but that’s also nonsense. Who gives a hoot that $100,000 in the 1990s would be closer to $180,000 today, because any way you peel it $100,000 is still a lot of money and any time our government is spending a lot of money, we as the taxpayers whose money is being used deserve to know how it’s being spent.
Anyone saying that we should raise the sunshine list threshold is directly arguing for less financial transparency in government spending, and there’s only one word for that: bananas.
James Culic will never be on the sunshine list because he’s made too many enemies at city halls across Ontario. He is a writer for Oakville News' sister site Pelham Today.
