Back when Mike Harris was premier, Ontarians were introduced to The Sunshine List. Martin Regg Cohn writes:
A quarter-century ago, then-premier Mike Harris dreamed up the ideological device of salary disclosure as a way to attack big government. He wanted to name and shame well paid public servants to put them in their place, feeding the fiction that they were wildly overpaid compared to the allegedly lean and mean private sector.
It fed the anti-government folly of the Harris Progressive Conservatives, who swept into power with their so-called Common Sense Revolution. Except it made little sense then and it’s even more nonsensical now.
Back in 1996, Harris set a $100,000 threshold for disclosure, but time hasn’t stood still. Adjusted for inflation, that benchmark should at the very least be updated to $155,960 for the latest salary disclosure.
Put another way, the Bank of Canada inflation calculator pegs today’s unadjusted $100,000 salary threshold as being equal to $64,120 back in 1996 — far below the figure that Harris set his sights on. There’s a reason even he didn’t target that lower number back then — $64,000 isn’t as provocative.
Twenty-five years have passed. And the $100,000 threshold has remained. Now the names on the list are not all high flyers:
Now we are being distracted by salary creep, as incomes rise inexorably above the outdated and unadjusted psychological marker of $100,000 — which isn’t nothing, but also isn’t worth what it was in Harris’s day. That’s why principals first started appearing on the list a few years ago, followed by some police officers earning overtime, and now the most senior school teachers at the top of their pay scale — all flooding the sunshine zone but obscuring the original intent of public scrutiny.
The furor last Friday, when the latest numbers showed so many teachers on the list, shows how disclosure can be deleterious and invidious. The amount we pay teachers in the top tier is not a secret — it’s a matter of public record, contractually determined.
The Sunshine List fueled what has become a hallmark of Conservative politics -- envy. And what about Mr. Harris?
Harris of course went on to make millions of dollars on corporate boards, leveraging his years in the premier’s job and proving that ideology and hypocrisy can be close cousins.
Image: Toronto Sun
6 comments:
While Harris may have intended to stoke envy of public sector wages, in fact, the release of each year's sunshine list is having less effect due to regular public sector wage freezes. It's just a media event that's largely ignored.
However, these types of wage disclosure laws are actually beneficial, as research shows they reduce the gender pay gap. For that reason, some Scandinavian countries have similar disclosure requirements for the private sector. In short, we would be better off applying sunshine laws more broadly to include the private sector so that meaningful comparisons can be made.
Cap
When sunshine serves as a disinfectant, Cap, it's beneficial. But when it merely stokes anger, it serves no good purpose.
It beggars belief that the salary threshold has not been raised over the years, Owen. The only conclusion I can draw is that its primary purpose remains to stoke envy, suspicion, and resentment, ideal tools of misdirection for an incompetent government.
It's a classic case of finding an enemy to avoid responsibility for one's own mistakes, Lorne.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Mike Harris. In the reign of his terror I, as a younger working father guided my two school age girls through that nightmare. Supporting my kids teachers was a primary focal point. Thank you Mike for proving me right in recognizing you as an Ass and solidifying my distrust of all things Conservative at all levels of Government.
He may have left the building, zoombats. But he still lives in the heads of Ontario's PCs.
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