Bring me sunshine

Sometimes, you just have to tip your hat to government for opening the windows and letting the sunshine in, however much glare it causes.

For instance, it’s been a perverse pleasure to follow the legislative committee hearings on the gas plant cancellations—a pleasure in the same way you just knew the Watergate hearings, tragic though they may have been for the office of the presidency, were going to wind up one way or another on Dick Nixon’s desk

And now the government of Ontario has just released its annual “Sunshine List” — the index of provincially funded employees who received over $100,000 in salaries and taxable benefits during the past year. It’s all laid out on the Ministry of Finance website. According to Premier Kathleen Wynne, the government has decided not to index the annual list to inflation over the past few years because $100,000, inflated or uninflated, is still a lot of money.

So thousands upon thousands of individual salaries are laid out, and the glaring examples shine out. There goes the deputy minister of Health, doing such sterling work that he took home $435,000 despite the Air Ornge fiasco, while the chief operating office of Air Ornge himself made $287,000. And there went the head of the Toronto District School Board, who managed to pull in $270,000 before he was caught with his pants down in a plagiarism scandal.

For the record, the County has just seven employees making salaries that cross over the threshold. That compares, is seems to me, fairly well with the City of Toronto, which had over 7,000 employees make the list this year, including five parking enforcement officers. Well, I know from personal experience that parking in downtown Toronto can be hell on wheels. Maybe mayor Rob Ford made the same mistake as George W. Bush did, in a different context, when he declared hostilities against the automobile to be over.

If you look at that Toronto group a little more closely, as the Toronto Star did, you discover that over 3,000 of them were police, and that this group comprises about 40 per cent of the whole force. A police spokesman hastened to explain that this ‘sudden’ increase occurred because a detective’s base salary jumped over the theshold last year, from $98,000 to $105,000 before overtime, and because a 2011 agreement with the CIty Police Services Board had entitled officers to an 11 per cent salary increase, staged over four years to 2014. That is a good explanation, all right, but hardly one that leaves me relieved.

Toronto employs its own police force. Here in the County, we contract services from the OPP under an agreement that expires in February, 2015. The County will remit about $4.9 million this year to the OPP for the service, for which, according to the County Police Services Board’s Chair Robert Quaiff, the OPP provides us with about 42 full-time officers. The County pays for about 32 of them. Over 90 per cent of their workload is of a municipal nature.

The OPP does not publish individual officers’ salaries as part of the Sunshine List. But OPP staff hardly do worse than Toronto police. Would-be recruits are told on the OPP website that they can expect to make $83,000 after three years of service. This is going up by an already negotiated 8.5 per cent in 2014. The provincial government has pledged to make the OPP the highest paid police force in the province, so that it will automatically benefit from any surge in pay in any municipal police force. So I think one is entitled to conclude that the top seven earners in the local OPP probably earn at least as much as the top seven County employees.

And while I’m at it, I might as well add that, according to the Police Services Board’s 2011 report, the County’s policing costs have doubled in the last 12 years. Yet our population has stayed static, and inflation accounts for only about a third of the difference.

All right, enough number flinging; here’s the point. At the local level, our despair over the winding down of the Picton Memorial Hospital reminds us how precious little control we have over how our health care dollars are allocated. The Sunshine List underscores just how little say we have on how our policing dollars are committed. In addition, we have next to no opportunity to compare the two envelopes—health care and policing—and ask whether one should be fatter and the other thinner. I’ve always thought of the County as a bucolic place with a large cadre of elderly people who need good health care, and little crime. Call me crazy, but I think there’s a serious resource allocation conversation to be had there somewhere.

Maybe it’s going to take somone like Dave Gray and his POOCH patrol bus convoy to start that conversation with Queen’s Park. I say good luck to them. Just watch out for those parking enforcement officers.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.