Public salaries not so public

QUEBEC – Every year, the Ontario government posts online the names of all employees in its public sector – municipalities, hospitals, universities, school boards and public-sector ventures, such as Hydro One – who are paid $100,000 a year or more.

In Quebec, as a rule, public-sector salaries are considered personal information, making it is illegal under the province’s access to information law to disclose pay figures.

Offenders who reveal public-sector salaries can be fined between $200 and $2,500.

Only broad salary scales – as wide as between $30,000 and $190,000 – may be disclosed for most Quebec public-sector employees.

This secrecy makes it impossible to determine true remuneration or to compare most public sector salaries.

Quebec does allow disclosure of compensation for senior managers in the public sector, however, including deputy ministers and senior bureaucrats, university and hospital administrators.

But Quebec does not make access to such information easy, or quick.

In Ontario, a 30-second, cost-free search of the province’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure website (www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/2010/) reveals the salaries of senior mangers, or anyone else in Ontario’s public sector, paid $100,000 a year and over.

In Quebec, it takes 30 days – the time it can take to process the required access to information request – to find out how much Quebec’s senior managers make.

There is an exception for those named by the provincial cabinet, such as the head of Hydro-Québec, other provincial bodies or deputy ministers, whose initial salaries and working conditions are published in the Gazette Officielle, a government publication costing $258 for an annual subscription, $223 for Internet access.

But it can take a month or more after a cabinet decree for salary details to be published. This delay, coupled with the media’s limited attention span, means that such senior salaries usually go unreported.

But interesting details can be found in the decrees. For instance, On Dec. 15 Louise Marchand, previously Quebec’s pay-equity commissioner, was named head of the Office québécois de la langue française, the body that enforces Quebec’s language laws.

The Jan. 12 edition of the Gazette Officielle revealed that Marchand will be paid $145,340.

Marchand’s predecessor at the Office, France Boucher, was paid $168,771, and Boucher retains the same salary in her new position, with less responsibility, as president of Quebec’s Régie du cinéma, classifying films as General, 13+, 16+ or 18+.

As for judges, Gazette Officielle decrees name them, but don’t reveal their salaries.

It took a calculation by Quebec Justice Department spokesperson Johanne Marceau to confirm that the base salary for a Quebec Court judge is $221,270.

By contrast, an Ontario Court judge is paid $245,422.45, according to Ontario’s salary disclosure website.

But Quebec’s access to information law, in force since 1982, states bluntly that “personal information is confidential.”

An official with Quebec’s Access to Information commission, who spoke on condition that she not be named because she was speaking personally and not for her agency, suggested the difference between Ontario and Quebec over salary disclosure is “cultural.”

“We do not ask someone what their salary is,” the official said.

Harold Tremblay, spokesperson for Quebec’s treasury board, defended Quebec’s system of disclosing broad salary scales and said of Ontario’s disclosure law: “We do not have the equivalent.”

In a telephone interview, Brian Beamish, assistant commissioner in the office of Ontario’s Information & Privacy Commissioner, said while privacy is an important value, “we have always taken the position that it’s not an absolute.”

“We have always supported the general principle that the public has the right to know how the public’s money is being spent,” Beamish said.

At his first news conference, Jean Chartier, Quebec’s new access and privacy commissioner, suggested he might recommend more transparency when he submits the commission’s five-year review to the government in June.

In her 2002 five-year review, as Quebec’s access and privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, now Canada’s privacy commissioner, called the five-four Supreme Court of Canada ruling that year in Macdonnell vs. Quebec “a direct challenge to our collective will to go toward the greatest possible transparency of the state.”

In Macdonnell vs. Quebec, the Supreme Court upheld the exemption of “personal information” from access requests and said Section 34 of the law, giving MNAs a veto over disclosure of their own documents, was reasonable.

The case was sparked when Gazette reporter Rod Macdonnell filed an access demand to disclose MNA expenses.

Stoddart suggested a “deep reflection” by Quebec’s lawmakers in revising the access law.

Following up on Stoddart’s review, the National Assembly agreed that government studies and reports should be posted on the web and required that the organization chart and staff list for departments and agencies should also be published.

But salary disclosure remained taboo.

Ontario’s 1996 Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act has raised concerns about privacy since coming into effect.

In a paper published in March 2010,University of Toronto researchers Rafael Gomez and Steven Wald found that such disclosure meant university presidents and professors with below-average salaries now know how much their counterparts were being paid.

Gomez and Wald conclude that the Ontario law “does achieve the laudable goal of increasing transparency,” but it also raises “privacy concerns.”

Beamish said in fact the commissioner has received “very, very few” privacy complaints about the disclosure law.

“Of course (disclosure) becomes a bargaining chip when you go in to negotiate your contract,” he said.

And every year when Ontario posts the new list, there is a media frenzy.

“Civil servants have become accustomed to that one day a year when the list goes out,” Beamish said.

But, “It has become a routine story,” he added. “For us, the goal of transparency is what we support.”

British Columbia and Manitoba also have public sector salary disclosure laws and Nova Scotia’s NDP government introduced its Public Sector Compensation Disclosure Act in November.

Only Ontario offers the “proactive disclosure” of an online database.

In British Columbia, in the absence of disclosure on a government website, the Vancouver Sun uses the B.C. access law to request the data and then posts it on the newspaper’s website, scoring 2.5 million hits in six months.

Unlike Quebec’s access law, the B.C. access law says disclosure of personal information about someone’s “position, functions or remuneration as an officer, employee or member of a public body or as a member of a minister’s staff” is not an unreasonable invasion of privacy.