Chance of clouds
City’s sunshine list should include precise figures, not just salary ranges
The City of Calgary’s socalled sunshine list is going to include a few clouds, if council accepts the recommendations of its administrators.
The lists — which traditionally disclose the names and compensation of all top- earning employees — are released by a number of provincial governments, including Alberta’s, and cities across Canada. It’s recommended that Calgary’s list would feature every employee, even those making less than $ 100,000 a year, but it would only include the civil servants’ names and the salary range associated with their positions. That’s not a sunshine list at all, and council’s priorities and finance committee, which meets today, should dismiss the notion of obscuring the total compensation that employees are paid. The city hasn’t shared the legal opinions it has received, but if existing privacy legislation is a barrier to full disclosure, the province can change it when it begins sitting in November.
The problem, of course — beyond the fact that citing a range of compensation isn’t disclosure at all — is that the figures wouldn’t include overtime. Overtime can make a sizable difference to a worker’s earnings, so the city would be being disingenuous if it presented a salary range as truly reflective of someone’s income. In Toronto, for instance, it was reported last year that 1,395 transit employees pocketed more than $ 100,000 in 2012 — an increase of 237 people from the year before. One of the big reasons for the increase? You guessed it: overtime.
“You have to work a lot of overtime to make that list,” transit spokesman Brad Ross told the Toronto Sun. “It is, of course, cheaper to pay overtime in many cases than it is in fact to hire more people to do that work.”
Fair enough, but the reason sunshine lists are popular isn’t simply because taxpayers are nosy and want to know how much civil servants are earning each year. Figures such as those from the Toronto Transit Commission can help guide a discussion about whether a department is being properly managed to reduce overtime where possible. The reason a premium is paid for working more than a standard shift is because it’s recognized to be an inconvenience to the employee. If overtime can be minimized, it’s good for taxpayers.
While providing a salary range might be defensible for senior managers, who we’d expect not to claim any overtime, it’s no substitute for a precise figure.
Another problem with Calgary’s proposed list is that it may not apply to the police service, which is one of the city’s most expensive departments, or to other city- financed agencies such as the library and convention centre. Surely, if there is going to be disclosure, it should apply to everyone. Revealing the earnings of some employees, and not others, is a recipe for fostering resentment among those whose salaries are made public. If there’s good reason to disclose the wages of some civil servants, then there’s good reason to release them all.
A report prepared for councillors mentions the often- cited concern that a sunshine list will lead to salary inflation, because newcomers will want to make more than their predecessors, and current employees will cast an envious eye at higher- paid people in similar positions. Countless public bodies provide the lists without worrying about wages creeping up. We’d expect the city to be judicious in its compensation, and the only way to assess that, of course, is through a sunshine list.