2020 Drastically Increased the Number of People on the Ontario Sunshine List
An analysis of Ontario Public Sector’s “Highest” Earners
Summary
- The 2020 Ontario Sunshine List was released on March 19th 2021. It reported a total of 205,470 members, out of which 38,512 were new, or an increase of 23%.
- While the list has expanded every year, this year’s growth was significantly larger than what the trend predicted.
- Led by nurses and teachers, the higher-than-expected surge can be explained by major compensation agreements in early 2020 and the government’s efforts to combat the pandemic.
This Report
What follows is a descriptive analysis of the Ontario Sunshine List. The main section is my attempt to shed some light on the effects of 2020 on Ontario’s high earners. Appendix A considers what would happen if the list’s cut-off salary was adjusted for inflation and Appendix B includes other descriptive statistics that were not relevant to the research question. The project is intended to be fully reproducible. If you’re interested in replicating or improving this analysis see the project’s Github page to get started.
What is the OSL
A sunshine list is the name commonly given to the public disclosure of employee compensation. In 1996, then premier Mike Harris, introduced the first Ontario Sunshine List (OSL), intending to disclose the salaries and benefits of all employees on the provincial government payroll who were considered high earners. Setting the floor at a salary of $100,000, the province reported 4,501 high earners that year, with an average salary of $121,495.2. Dictated by the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act (1996), the government has required ever since that organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario disclose by March 31 the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year.
To the criticism of many, the list’s cut-off has remained the same since 1996, failing to account for inflation (see Appendix A). While these renders the list a poor comparison to its earliest iterations in terms of purchasing power, it remains a useful tool to track broad changes in compensation trends across the public sector.
Uninterrupted Growth
The number of people in the Ontario Sunshine List has increased with every release since its conception 25 years ago. It was twice as big by 2000, ten times by 2008, and today the list is 45 times larger than in 1996. Regardless, the yearly average earnings have remained mostly constant around $127k, likely because increasing existing salaries are compensated by new additions to the list, most of which earn a salary close to the floor.
Recorded by Government Sector
The data provided is categorized by government sector. While these sectors change slightly year-to-year as a result of administrative changes and operational restructuring (See Appendix B for a full list), we can functionally classify all employees reported in 9 independent groups. The following figure shows the number of people in the list through time divided by sector.
The size of sectors vary but Municipalities have captured the highest share of high earners for most of the list’s existence.
2020 in Review
The last release of the OSL reported an increase in members by a total of 38,512 employees and a reduction in the average salary by $1,523.
Municipalities, School-Boards and Hospitals
Municipalities, School-Boards, and Hospitals, top the share of high earners in 2020 by a significant margin, making-up almost two thirds of the total.
Municipalities
- Police constables ($118k), managers ($129k), and firefighters ($117k), constituted almost a third of the job titles in Municipalities in 2020.
- The average salary was $123,291.5. The highest paid positions were Chief of Police ($481k), Chief of Police ($436k), and City Planner ($387k).
All sectors saw the number of people making over $100k increase, but it was School Boards and Hospitals that saw the biggest change.
School Boards
- Teachers ($103k) dominated the School Board sector in 2020, making up 97% of jobs in the group.
- The average salary was $109,083.8. The highest paid positions were Legal Counsel ($382k), Director of Education ($334k), and Director of Education and Secretary-Treasurer ($316k).
Hospitals
- The sector was topped by Nurses ($110k), followed by Managers ($116k), and Directors ($148k).
- The average salary was $120,083.3. The highest paid positions were President and CEO ($845k), President and CEO ($776k), and President and CEO ($733k).
Job Titles
Teachers and nurses were by far the most popular jobs in the Ontario Sunshine List of 2020. The best paying jobs in contrast went mostly to the Ontario Power Sector with President and CEO ($1.22M), President Nuclear ($1.13M), and CEO/Chief Nuclear Officer ($901k) as the top 3.
Modeling Growth
Using a generalized additive model (GAM) with a Poisson distribution, I forecast what growth in the list could have looked like if the number of people in the list increased according to the observed trend leading to 2020.
Overall growth higher than expected
This model concludes that the increase in the number of people in the OSL in 2020 was much higher than expected. While it predicted that only 190,464 public sector workers would earn more than $100k, or a growth of 14%. Instead, the list featured 205,470 members (23%), surpassing expectations by 15,006 employees.
This fact alone may raise some eyebrows but it is important to investigate the sources of such increase before reaching any conclusions.
The Culprits
We can apply the same technique for individual sectors in the list. This allows us to identify the impact of 2020 on each sector and attempt to determine where the above-expectations growth came from.
While earlier we learned that municipalities make up the largest share of the list and saw one of the biggest increases of 2020, we can see that its count is in line with our model’s predictions. Instead, when accounting for the expected trend, Crown Agencies join School Boards and Hospitals, in the list of sectors which growth exceeded expectations.
Crown Agencies
Crown Agencies make a smaller share of the list but its higher-than-predicted growth warrants a closer look.
- The model predicted 8,340 members but the data reported 9,332 — a difference of 992 employees
- About 40% of the growth can be explained by increases in Managers, Case Managers, and Specialist, return to work program.
- The difference is likely a result of the various agencies’ efforts to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The government has engaged on several hiring rounds of Case Managers and Contact Tracers intending to “to help track, trace and isolate new cases of COVID-19”. By January 2021, Ontario had reported 5,600 case and contact tracers in the province.
- Specialist, return to work program, are employees in Ontario’s Workplace Safety & Insurance Board that are tasked with helping injured workers that have had difficulties returning to work.
- While I found no evidence to confirm this, I presume part of the increase in Managers and Specialists, occurred due to a heightened need for logistics and planning, and the hazardous nature of the pandemic on workplaces, respectively.
School Boards
- The model predicted 33,994 School Board members in the 2020 list. Ontario reported 43,805 — a difference of 9,811 employees
- Virtually all growth came from new to the list teachers (a shocking ~40% of the total increase in 2020).
- As front-line workers, teachers in Ontario have been fully exposed to the dangers and impacts of the pandemic. While increased working hours help explain this growth, it was a major compensation agreement in early 2020 that was likely the main source.
- The 2019–2020 school year was a contract negotiation year for all unionized workers in School Boards in Ontario. The government ratified agreements with the various teacher unions throughout spring of 2020.
- The collective agreements included raises in compensation and benefits (given retroactively) and were negotiated with all five relevant unions (Ontario Council of Educational Workers (OCEW), Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Education Workers’ Alliance of Ontario (EWAO), Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO)).
- Apart from the raise, it is likely that overtime and teachers filling in in administrative positions also contributed to the increase in teachers in the 2020 OSL. Also notable, the pandemic led to a significant rise in the number of social workers in all three sectors.
Hospitals
- The model predicted 26,297 Hospital members in the 2020 list. Ontario reported 33,928 — a difference of 7,631 employees
- Similar to School Boards, the distribution of job titles in Hospitals and Boards of Public Health is skewed towards one profession. Nurses made up more than 70% of the sector increase in 2020 and almost a quarter of the total growth.
- The provincial government has been expanding their nursing staff since mid 2020. Alongside it, a pandemic pay bump given to health care workers in the fall, as well as overtime hours in dealing with the pandemic, explain the drastic increase.
- In line with the health implications of COVID-19, we see the number of respiratory therapists on the list rose by 300% from 2019.
Conclusion
There is only so much we can extrapolate from this limited information. While we can conclude that the increment observed was higher than normal, and this was due to very large increases in the number of teachers and nurses, it is impossible to determine whether the decisions behind such changes were appropriate, successful, or efficient.
Many argue that the list’s floor should be raised according to inflation (see Appendix A), whereas other countries like Norway have opted for full transparency in the public sector. It is clear that the cut-off, as it exists now, does more to confuse than clarify. A yearly income of $100k dollars, while far from the median ($37,500 as of 2019), covers too broad of a stroke to facilitate insights on the highest earners, but too narrow to attempt to investigate broad changes in the public sector. In fact, most of the reporting that follows the list’s release, focuses seldomly on the individuals earning the highest salaries (like CTV or CBC). This is important information, but one that fails to give us any valuable big-picture insights.
Further analysis on the OSL is welcomed, with interesting research questions like contrasting trends through time with electoral cycles or economic fluctuations, investigating income distributions across sectors, or even a longitudinal analysis that follows individuals over years.
Appendix A — Adjusting for Inflation
The OSL is criticized for using the same cut-off at $100K that it began with, instead of adjusting for inflation. Any analysis that intends to learn more about Ontario’s highest earners, needs to account for the difference in purchasing power between 1996 and 2020. If we were to adjust for inflation, the floor today should sit at $156,916.
Only 22% Remain
By adjusting all salaries to 1996 dollars (using Ontario CPI All-items values from Stats Can), we can identify how the list would have changed in the presence of a moving floor. While the list containing all years available houses 1,674,697 recorded salaries, when adjusting for inflation only 370,803 remain, or the equivalent to 22.1%.
2020 Using an Adjusted Cut-Off
The 2020 list shrinks by 88.1% when adjusting for inflation, totaling only 24,444 members.
This analysis shows that at the higher cut-off, universities dominate the list and have done so for quite some time. This is likely due to the nature of the sector, where the majority of its members are professors. The average salary of an Ontario Professor in the 2020 OSL is $167k compared to nurses at $110k and teachers at $103k
Matched only at first by Ontario Power Generation, Universities begin dominating the list using an adjusted cut-off around 2006. While all other sectors have remained mostly constant for the past ten years, only Universities (and Municipalities to a far lesser extent) have experienced a steady growth.
Modeling the List of Really High Earners
Adjusting the cut-off virtually means reducing the list to the very high earners. Repeating the exercise, we model growth using a GAM on the trend leading to 2020.
Similarly, we see an increase higher than expected though with larger margins of error.
When eliminating those making between $100k and $156k from the list, the trends get messier. The model indicates that all but the Crown Agencies and Hospital sectors saw growth in line with projections.
- The increase in Crown Agencies came from Directors ($187k) and Managers ($189)
- The increase in Hospitals came from Directors ($186k), Nurses ($176k), and Pathologists ($311k)
Appendix B — Supplemental Information
The following is a collection of charts and tables that are not relevant for the research question and as such are presented with little context.
Breakdown of Sectors Through the Years
Ratio of Management versus Professional Job Titles
Comparing the ratio of management and professional job titles in the 2020 OSL suggests that around 1/3 of the list is made up of managers. As expected, when adjusting the cut-off point, the ratio goes up to 40:60.
Average Earnings by Sector
In 2020
Through Time
Adjusting for Inflation
