Around this time each year in Ontario we see news articles about the release of the latest ‘Sunshine List’, a list of public sector employees from municipal to provincial that earned more than $100,000 last year.
But, as I have written in previous years, $100,000 is not what it used to be.
In 2025, 13 employees of the Municipality of Meaford landed on the Sunshine List, one more than the dozen that were on the list for 2024. The top salary for Meaford employees in 2025 was $149,120.09 for municipal Treasurer Valerie Manning.
Meaford’s 13 Sunshine List members are joined by nearly 405,000 public sector employees across the province who earned more than $100,000 in 2025. The first year that the list was published in 1996, there were just 4,756 on the list, and that number has grown by the thousands each and every year as $100,000 has become a much more common salary in both the private and public sectors.
The Municipality of Meaford had no employees earning enough to land them on the list until 2009, when former CAO Frank Miele became the first with a reported income of $118,000 in that year. It took 13 years from the creation of the Sunshine List for a Meaford employee to land on the list, and in the years since the number of municipal employees in Meaford to be included in the list has gradually increased.
Had the initial $100,000 threshold for the annual Sunshine List been adjusted for inflation from the outset, the threshold to land on the list in 2025 would have been roughly $185,000, which would mean that Meaford would not have a single employee on the list this year, and wouldn’t have had in any of the previous 30 years.
If you have been a reader of this newspaper over the past 16 years, you will know that I am no fan of Ontario’s Sunshine List.
We’ve had the annually published Sunshine List for 30 years now. Back in 1996 when the Mike Harris Conservative government passed the Ontario Public Disclosure Act, the government of the day suggested it would offer transparency and would highlight increasing spending on public sector payrolls. The Act requires organizations that receive provincial funding to make public the names, positions, and salaries of employees who are paid $100,000 or more each year.
As a result, for the past 30 years we in Ontario have had the ability to know who in our various government bodies earns more than $100,000. The reality is that an annual salary of $100,000 back in 1996 was a hefty chunk of change, however it is much less so today, yet the threshold for earning a spot on the list hasn’t budged. As you might expect, without an annual adjustment for inflation, more and more public sector employees are landing on the list every year.
In 1996, when the Sunshine List was first introduced, Ontario’s minimum wage was $6.85 per hour, or $14,248 per year for those who worked 40 hours per week in 1996.
The median annual individual income in Ontario in 1996 was $21,099, which meant that $100,000 was a significant salary indeed.
When Ontario’s minimum wage increases in October of this year to $17.95 per hour, those working a full 40-hour week will earn a little over $37,000 per year.
The estimated median annual individual income in Ontario today is $44,000, making a $100,000 salary less out of touch with the masses than in 1996.
So in 1996 those earning minimum wage were at best earning 14 percent of the lowest wage earners on the Sunshine list, those who earned $100,000, while 30 years later, in 2026, minimum wage earners are being paid 37 percent of those at the bottom of the annual Sunshine List.
Should $100,000 still be the threshold in 2026? I have long argued that it should not.
Don’t get me wrong, $100,000 is still a heck of a good salary that many would love to earn, but it is not the same today as in 1996, when very few, even in important and respected professions, earned such a hefty salary.
Whether public or private sector, there are many professions in which one could earn more than $100,000 in today’s economy. Software engineers, police officers, firefighters, nurses, truck drivers, salespeople, and even plumbers and auto mechanics (to name just a few) can find themselves earning more than $100,000 these days.
Today, some 25 percent of all full-time, year-round workers in Ontario earn $100,000 or more whether they are in the private or public sectors. Roughly 80 percent of full-time, year-round workers in Ontario earn more than $50,000 per year, and nearly 40 percent earn more than $75,000 each year.
Of the roughly 9 million workers in Ontario, approximately 20 percent of them are public sector employees of some sort, or some 1.6 million people who work for various levels of government, from the provincial government itself to municipalities and school boards to federal employees (who are not part of the provincial Sunshine List).
If the threshold had been adjusted for inflation each year, there would not be 405,000 public sector employees on the Sunshine list this year, but rather an estimated 30,075.
Rather than ‘shaming’ teachers, and nurses, and doctors, and police officers, and firefighters, municipal administrators, and dozens of other taxpayer-funded professions for earning a living wage, why isn’t our focus on the corporate world, where there is a refusal to pay real living wages while CEOs rake in millions upon millions, many accumulating billions of dollars on the backs of underpaid workers? Why do we feel the need to shame government workers while letting obscenely wealthy corporate CEOs off the hook?
I appreciate that our tax dollars pay for these government worker salaries, and I am all for transparency and accountability, but I don’t think that is what the Sunshine List offers us. Instead it gives us a snapshot of government workers who earn a salary that was considered excessive 30 years ago, an income that today in the private sector is common for many professions, and not considered to be excessive.
So in my view, and the view of many others, in 2026 the Sunshine List is essentially meaningless.
