Column: Are you kidding? $100,000 is still a lot of money

A A few years ago, when the Commonwealth Games were held in Delhi, the city hired security guards but paid them a measly $10 a day. To be fair, the security guards were langurs and their $10 was paid out in bananas. The monkeys were stationed around the arenas to keep away wild dogs and snakes.

The pay may have been meager, but at least the Commonwealth Games were open and honest about salaries and had no problem disclosing the monkey money, which is more than can be said for many cities across Ontario.

A story published last week by the CBC was headlined, “Ontario’s Sunshine List system is now unfair to small towns,” and let me tell you, this article is driving me crazy, no offense to the langur monkey security guards.

The gist of the article is that the annual Sunshine List, which forces Ontario municipalities to publicly disclose the salaries of workers making $100,000 or more, is somehow “unfair” for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because Apparently they make so much money isn’t even remarkable anymore.

The mayor of Central Frontenac claimed that people don’t understand that “$100,000 isn’t a lot of money these days.”

Wow, I guess I didn’t know that Central Frontenac is a magical place where money grows on trees and the streets are paved with diamonds and gold. It must be nice to live in a place where “it’s not a lot of money,” be in the top tax bracket, and earn a six-figure salary.

For the rest of us realtors who don’t live in Central Frontenac, the salary distribution is certainly very different. According to Statistics Canada, the bottom 90 percent of Canadians earn an average annual salary of $28,000. It looks to me like 90 percent of Canadians think a $100,000 salary is a lot of money.

Setting aside the utter insanity of calling a six-figure salary “not a lot of money,” let’s look for a moment at the other argument from this hack article, which is that publicly disclosing salaries makes it difficult to attract “the best” talent to keep.

“The current system is also unfair because private employers…can see what the municipality is offering in terms of salaries,” which, according to this article, means City Hall employees are being poached by private sector companies that look at the sunshine list and simply offer higher salaries.

To that I would say: good. Let her go. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work. Going into the private sector to earn a higher salary is a good thing, it’s kind of the cornerstone of how a functioning economic system is supposed to work.

There is always someone willing to take that job at City Hall

If someone is “poached” by the private sector, simply replace them with a new person at City Hall. If that person is “poached,” replace them as well. Think about it, this pattern can’t go on forever, there isn’t an endless supply of private sector jobs that will endlessly steal City Hall employees until the end of time. There is always someone willing to take that job at City Hall. When a position opens up at City Hall, they receive hundreds and hundreds of applications.

And don’t bullshit me about how you have to pay the city’s CAO an absurd $300,000 salary to get “the best talent,” because that’s pure fantasy. There is someone who will do the CAO job for $80,000 and do it perfectly.

Every year when the Sunshine List is released, a few whiny, quixotic elites complain that it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since 1996, so the threshold should be raised, but that’s nonsense too. Who cares that $100,000 in the 1990s would be closer to $180,000 today, because no matter how you look at it, $100,000 is still a lot of money, and every time our government a lot When we spend money, we are the taxpayers whose money is being used. I deserve to know what it is being spent on.

Anyone who says we should raise the Sunshine List thresholds is directly advocating for less financial transparency in government spending, and there is only one word for that: bananas.

James Culic will never be on the sunshine list because he has made too many enemies in town halls across Ontario. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or calculate a 100,000 word letter to the editor and Deposit it here.