The CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, Charles Emond, is the highest paid Quebec civil servant, reveals the first list of salaries for the Quebec public service.
Mr. Emond and nine of his colleagues who manage the Caisse and its subsidiaries monopolize the entire top 10 of the highest paid people with public funds in Quebec, found our Bureau of Investigation by compiling the remuneration of nearly 20,000 executives and elected officials.
The list that we have drawn up is similar to what exists in most other Canadian provinces, including the famous “Sunshine list” in Ontario. It is available today at jdem.com/salaries, and the top 1000 will also be included tomorrow in our pages.
With a salary of $4.4 million, the CEO of the Caisse earns 16 times more than Prime Minister François Legault. He is well ahead of his right-hand man and head of infrastructure, Emmanuel Jaclot, who pockets the tidy sum of $2.9 million this year.
Nathalie Palladitcheff, CEO of Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate branch of the Caisse, comes next with compensation of $2.85 million, including bonuses.
Guy LeBlanc, who headed Investissement Québec until last January, brings up the rear of the 12 civil servants who earned more than a million in 2023.
“What jumps out at me is everything that is linked to capital, finance, investment, the future economic development of Quebec, that’s where we find the highest remuneration,” says Audrey Laurin-Lamothe, associate professor at York University, who specializes, among other things, in everything related to compensation.
Public service millionaires
These Quebec executives earn more than $1 million per year
Normal in the field of finance
François Dauphin, director of the Institute on the Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP), is also not surprised to see high salaries among senior civil servants in the financial sector.
“We compare ourselves to the CEOs of large companies listed on the stock exchange (…), where you are offered stock-based compensation, options, elements on which you could, if the company does well, enrich yourself- even,” he explains.
The Caisse, for its part, maintains that the investment environment is “a very competitive work environment”, which explains the remuneration of its managers.
“We operate alongside other Canadian and foreign pension funds, investment funds, brokerage companies and financial institutions who fiercely compete for a talent pool with highly sought-after expertise in Quebec and internationally. “, explains spokesperson Kate Monfette.
Find the right people?
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe finds that it is “a little overrated to make us believe that we are in an international market of managers”.
“If we look at the profile of the people who are at the top of the Caisse de dépôt or Investissement Québec, these are people who have worked in Quebec in the past,” she underlines.
For her part, political scientist and professor of public administration at the University of Ottawa, Geneviève Tellier, is “not convinced that high salaries are the only way to attract the best candidates.”
“Could we have someone who is at the head of the Caisse de dépôt and who costs less than $4 million and who does the job well? This is the question that the government should ask itself,” she says.
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