The newspaper presents to you from today the first real directory of salaries of public service employees and elected officials in Quebec.
Do you know the Sunshine list?
This is a great example of transparency from the Ontario government. On its website, we find the salaries of ALL employees paid with public funds who earn more than $100,000.
The list is updated regularly and contains exactly 300,570 names, whether union members or managers. This has been provided for by law since 1996.
Most other provinces, including Alberta and Manitoba, have similar initiatives.
In Quebec, we are instead treated to a mixture of clutter and secrecy. The government makes public the salaries of around 500 executives and elected officials, including ministers, cabinet directors and the highest civil servants. The figures for 2024 should also be public on May 15.
Dozens of municipalities and state corporations also publish, each separately, information on the salaries of some of their managers. And that’s all.
We deserve better
We told ourselves that Quebec taxpayers, who are taxed the most in North America, according to Finance Minister Eric Girard, deserved better.
My colleague Charles Mathieu, from the Bureau of Investigation, therefore took two months to try to collect all the available information on the salaries paid to Quebec civil servants, whether they work for a branch of the provincial government or a municipality. He sent more than 300 access to information requests and consulted hundreds of reports. Added to these data are the salaries of all municipal elected officials and the National Assembly.
Thanks also to the talent of our web developers, the tool that we are making public today on our website at jdem.com/salaries is as easy to consult as the Sunshine list Ontario.
Type in the name of a person, position or public organization, and you’re done. In particular, you will be able to find out the salaries of the majority of the 13,000 executives in the health network.
For example, at the CISSS de Chaudière-Appalaches alone, I counted 15 coordinators of social and rehabilitation programs. Maybe the news top gun who manages the health network, Geneviève Biron, will find it interesting to consult our tool…
Union members and absent doctors
It is obviously not a scandal that an engineer, team leader in the town of L’Assomption, earns $123,000 per year. Or that an elementary school principal in Shawinigan receives $119,883. But if the disclosure of the salaries of people paid by public funds has been a form of basic transparency in Ontario for almost 30 years, it should be the same thing in Quebec.
The compilation we present today is the most complete ever made. But unfortunately it does not include doctors, considered self-employed. It also does not include teachers (who are nevertheless on the Ontario list), because Quebec public organizations do not provide lists of names for their unionized employees.
For the same reason, it is impossible to know who are the 100 unionized Montreal police officers and firefighters who received remuneration of more than $200,000 last year. In Ontario, such information would be public.
Lack of transparency
We also came up against blatant lacks of transparency.
Investissement Québec, for example, has more than 170 executives, but has provided almost nothing. The state company simply referred us to the annual report, which only contains the salaries of 5 managers.
We will continue to follow up on public organizations, and count on us to update the list as soon as we obtain new data.
We also dream of doing a similar exercise for the mammoth of the federal government. Wish us luck!
-Jean-Louis Fortin, director of the Bureau of Investigation
