The sunshine club – the annual list of people who made $100,000 or more in the previous year – is information that has grown to be a massive database over the years.
There are 377,665 names on the provincial list for 2024.
For years, we have advocated for keeping the list at the $100,000 threshold, which has been in place since its inception in 1996. After all, a $100,000 annual salary is still a lot of money to most people in Chatham-Kent, even today.
However, the sunshine club list is becoming untenable, made more difficult by the manner in which the province just dumps the information online.
The list has essentially become a roadblock as opposed to a boulevard to information gathering for the average citizen.
Sure, all the information is present, but it’s like pointing to a pile of paper in the back of a recycling truck, being told everything you are looking for is in there, and having to start sorting. You might be interested in the 392 names from the Municipality of Chatham-Kent that are on the list for wage grabbing in 2024, but you are searching through those 377,665 names.
For example, search “Municipality of Chatham-Kent” on the Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure page for 2024 and everything and everyone with “Kent” or “Chatham” in their name is included. Pages of people with the first name “Kent” pop up, as do pages of people with the surname “Kent.” Nearly 18,000 names are revealed with that search.
You can search “salary paid,” “employer,” or job title, but the material comes at you in a vomit of information. In most cases, it’s in alphabetical order. If you’re following the money only, you start with Kenneth Hartwick and his $2-million salary as top boss at Ontario Power Generation and work your way down. It’s a long way down from $2 million to C-K’s CAO Michale Duben at $335,885.
Downloading a spreadsheet is a better way to go in some ways, but searching for specific names can be challenging.
For starters, it’s a 26 mb document. No graphics, just names.
And then there are the sub categories, another roadblock any way you search it. You see, “Crown Agencies” is a category. And inside that category are sub categories such as the Independent Electricity Operator, WSIB, LCBO, the Ontario Pension Board, etc., etc.
Under “Crown Agencies,” there are 18,724 names.
How about “Government?” Everything from judges to crown attorneys, to OPP staff and officers, MPPs, staff inside every cabinet position and beyond is contained within that category. That totals another 32,830 names.
Hospital staff from around the province, municipal personnel and school board employees are all in there as well.
We downloaded all three options available from the provincial site to see if any of them were easier to sift through than the others. Be it an Excel spreadsheet, comma-separated values or JSON coding, they all, quite frankly, sucked.
The average person who is not Excel savvy is left scrolling.
Thankfully, there are independent websites such as ontariosunshinelist.com, that is much easier to use. It allows you to even search an individual’s name, or employer. However, it too can be limiting. For example, if you want to see more than the top 100 names from a particular employer, good luck. That’s the limit of their pull-down options.
In short, there is no easy way to surf through the vast information provided. You can get snapshots, look at top 100s in various areas, or go down the proverbial rabbit hole and spend hours searching and searching – and you may still not get everything you are looking for.
That seems to be the way of government transparency these days. Provide one large information dump, declare everything is in there and not care about how useful the format provided.
What started nearly 30 years ago by the Harris government ostensibly as a form of financial transparency has evolved into murk or at best, translucency. It’s not easy to spot what you are looking for, and that is certainly not government transparency.
