Toronto Salary Disclosure

The $68-million question

On June 7, Georgina Thompson stepped down after six years as the chair of the board for the South East Local Health Integration Network in the Kingston-Belleville-Brockville region.

She was easily the busiest of all LHIN board chairs last year.

In 2010, she billed Ontario taxpayers $89,250 in per diems for sitting as the LHIN chair — not far from the $100,000 threshold for the annual Public Sector Salary Disclosure list in per diems alone.

At $350 a day, the going rate for each of the 14 LHIN board chairs, it means Thompson billed for 255 days of LHIN board work in 2010.

To put that in perspective, when Ontario’s nine statutory holidays plus Easter are added, Thompson billed the equivalent of 53 five-day work weeks in a 52-week year.

A year earlier, Thompson collected $82,075 in per diems, giving her a two-year total of just over $171,000 — not including expenses — for being the chair of a LHIN board that is supposed to meet once a month in open session.

For that, she’s unapologetic.

“I’m quite proud of the work that I’ve done here,” she said. “I’ve put my heart and soul into this for six years because I believed in it.

“Yes, I did spend a lot of time building relationships and partnerships with the health-service providers in my region so that we would be able to start to constructively look at this system and how we make a true system of care that’s accessible for the residents that we serve,” Thompson added.

“Yes, I did spend a lot of my time over and above the time that you’re quoting there to ensure that that happened.”

Others have a different view.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Andrea Horwath, provincial NDP leader and MPP for Hamilton Centre. “It’s obvious that the LHINs are completely out of control.

“There’s no oversight whatsoever as to what they’re doing and you can see that in some of these numbers, where you can have them billing for more weeks than exist in a year.”

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, is just as venomous.

“This is an obvious abuse of scarce health-care dollars,” said Hudak. “The LHIN chair has turned what is supposed to be a part-time position of public service into a full-time gig on the backs of Ontario taxpayers.

“This is just the latest example of how the LHINs have turned into a runaway wasteful bureaucracy.

City of Toronto salary disclosure numbers | Voice of Toronto

Under The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996, all organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario must disclose the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year.

In 2009, the City of Toronto employed 2,071 staff who earned a salary of over $100,000. The definition of salary includes all earnings received in the year and may include payments, overtime, stand-by pay, vacation payouts, severance payments etc. This represents 4.6 per cent of the City’s workforce and is an increase of 519 employees from 2008. Had the labour disruption not occurred, the City of Toronto would only have an additional 91 employees on the 2009 salary disclosure list.

As a result of the 39 day labour disruption, approximately 428 non-union employees who were responsible for providing critical services who earn less than $100,000 in their base salary, earned in excess of $100,000 in 2009 as a result of being required to work overtime. They are included in the City’s salary disclosure report.

The City of Toronto pays competitive, fair market salaries comparable to other public sector organizations that are similar in size, scope and complexity, to attract and retain well-qualified, highly skilled and experienced personnel required to manage a publicly accountable organization.

There has been a significant increase in the number of employees included on the list since the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act was introduced in 1996.The main reason for this is that the earning level of $100,000 has not been adjusted to account for inflation. If adjusted annually by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Toronto, we would now be reporting only those employees who earned greater than $128,409. This would include only 523 City employees in 2009.

These numbers do not include employees who work in the City’s agencies, boards and commissions such as the Toronto Police Service, the Toronto Transit Commission and the Toronto Public Library. Agencies, boards and commissions are responsible for their own budgets and the salaries of their employees.

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