McLeod is compiling the list because both the former administration and the current one have committed to publishing one but haven't done so yet. Several other provinces publish similar lists of public employees who make more than $100,000 a year.
The union's says it's okay to disclose the position title and income but McLeod shouldn't have the name of the person holding the job. It's a insane argument since there is no practical way to withhold either of the three elements of the request - name, position, salary - such that a person couldn't make up the list after a couple of requests. It's an insane argument from because the unions don't oppose disclosure of the name and position separately from the salary. Well, at least they haven't objected so far.
But the position taken by the unions doesn't make sense for a bunch of other reasons.
A little over a century ago, the Newfoundland
government released a directory each year that listed the name of every public
servant along with his or her salary, position and religious affiliation. The purpose was to show that government jobs were divided evenly among the denominations. In other places, the identity of public servants, their position, and salary has been public for as long or longer. Once it became important to prove that government awarded jobs on the basis of merit instead of patronage, publishing names served as a check against any shenanigans by public servants or politicians to get their friends into cushy jobs.
We have a long history in
The most recent review of the provincial government's access and privacy laws was comprehensive and the final report by the commission is a thorough review of the current state of thinking about the subjects. The commission wrote:
In an age where the values of equality and democracy are seen increasingly as being central in our society there is diminishing justification for holding confidential the payment schemes for employees and officials who are paid from the public purse. Unfortunately, this does result in less privacy for those public officials and employees. However, the deleterious effect of disclosing salaries or pay scales has yet to be shown. Some, such as judges and elected officials, have been subject to such a regime for years.
"The privacy of public employees needs to be balanced
against the public’s right to know how their tax dollars are spent,"
the commission concluded. "Contemporary values of transparency
and accountability for public funds tip the balance in favour of disclosure."
The recommendation in the report and the subsequent legislation prepared
by the commission restored the wording, evolved slightly since 1981, to allow
for the disclosure of the name, position, and remuneration of every provincial public
servant in the province.
The intention of the public sector unions is to restrict access
to information the public has had a right to obtain since at least 1981 and arguably that it has been able to get for over a century.
The legislature and the courts across Canada have upheld that right as recently as 2015 and, as the review
commission noted, none of the province's public sector unions made any
representation on this or any other issue at the time.
Added to this fact, we must weigh the evidence that over the
course of the past 35 years, public sector unions have not raised
objection to the disclosure of the name, position, and remuneration of public
servants together. They have had plenty of opportunity. The issue
has not been invisible. As the commissioners noted in 2014, disclosure of
the sort we are talking about here is commonplace and has commonplace been for decades.
The fact that it has survived for so long without objection surely
indicates a general acceptance by the public, including public servants, that
such disclosure is appropriate.
Some people have pointed to another section of the access
act that supposedly contradicts the plain words of section 40, sub 2 (f) of the Access
to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. We should pay attention
here to the stated intention of the commission in its report and the way they
have constructed section 40. At the front end, they have told us what are
acceptable violations of a public servant's individual privacy.
Afterward, they tell us all the sorts of things that are not
acceptable violations. The intention is clear in the legislation and
anyone with any doubt can read the report to see the logic behind the way the
commission wrote the law. The acceptable violations are very few.
The protections of a public servant's privacy are great in scope and
number.
The Sunshine List
The Sunshine List
The concern in the recent flurry of access requests seems to be that some people are subject to disclosure based on an arbitrarily chosen income. They argue that those high income earners might be blamed by some people for the provincial government's financial difficulties. These are understandable concerns but they are not good reasons to change disclosure that represents a fundamental and legitimate public interest in how the government spends public money.
The figure of $100,000 has no special meaning. Someone could have easily picked an amount higher or lower. The figure has the advantage of being a simple, round number. It is also a figure used in other places to produce so-called "sunshine" lists.
The fact that the number has no special meaning does not make it an improper or illegitimate one. Statistics
And that is all such a list does.
People making that much money and considerably more may find it uncomfortable to have that personal information available for public discussion but that is a long-standing consequence of having your salary paid out of the public purse. It is hardly anything more than an inconvenience and, when it comes to the public service, it is a burden shared equally across the entire work force. The lowliest clerk in the lowliest department is as liable to have her name, job title, and salary available to the public as is the Clerk of the Executive Council.
They call it a "sunshine" list after the idea that exposing information to the daylight of public disclosure is the best cure for impropriety. That's part of the legitimate interest behind the public disclosure of names, titles, and salaries.
We should have more information. We shouldn't just focus on the highly paid ones. Coupled with other information, we can all gain an insight into the public service that we wouldn't have otherwise. In some of the recent stories by the Telegram's James McLeod, the public has seen some of that additional information. Some public agencies have seen a growth in high salaries that is out of line with the size of the particular organization's labour force as a whole. That raises other questions that we should answer as well. In some cases there are good explanations for the numbers. In others, there haven't been any offered so far.
-srbp-
