Twelve of Meaford’s municipal staff members received salaries in excess of $100,000 in 2024, earning them a spot on Ontario’s annual ‘Sunshine List’.
Each year organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario must disclose the names, positions, salaries, and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year; the compiled list is commonly referred to as the ‘sunshine list’.
Current employees of the Municipality of Meaford to make the list in 2024 are as follows:
- Treasurer Valerie Manning: $131,072.90
- Director of Operations Jessica Wiley: $125,814.71
- Director of Human Resources & Community Services Sarah Mahon: $117,602.10
- Chief Building Official Bart Toby: $115,161.90
- Manager of Transportation Jeffrey Fries: $107,023.07
- Manager of Planning Services Denise McCarl: $105,211.75
- Deputy Clerk Margaret Wilton-Siegel: $103,048.40
- Library CEO Lynne Fascinato: $100,207.10
Four employees who are no longer with the municipality also appear on the 2024 Sunshine List: former CAO Rob Armstrong ($182,509.60), former Director of Development Robert Voigt ($123,921.84), former Clerk Matthew Smith ($157,956.23 ), and former Fire Chief Courtney Allen ($111,511.40).
Additionally, the twelve municipal employees also earned taxable benefits valued from $1,409 to $2,089.
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. In the years since, Meaford has had as many as twelve employees make the list, and as few as three.
According to the province’s February 2025 Labour Market Report, the average hourly wage rate in Ontario for employees was $37.39 in February (above the national average of $36.14), or roughly $77,771 per year based on a 40-hour work-week.
In 1996 the Mike Harris Conservative government passed the Ontario Public Disclosure Act, which the government of the day suggested would offer transparency and highlight increasing spending on public sector payrolls. The average annual wage in Ontario when the Act was passed in 1996 was approximately $27,000.
The original threshold of $100,000 to earn a spot on the annual Sunshine List has never been adjusted for inflation, which has resulted in an ever-growing number of public sector employees being included in the list each year. In the first year of the list’s publication it included just 4,756 public sector employees, while by 2020 more than 205,000 made it onto the list. This year’s (2024) Sunshine List includes more than 377,000 public sector employees.
Had the threshold been adjusted for inflation annually, public sector employees would today need to earn more than $175,000 in order to be included on the list.
The full database of Ontario’s public salary disclosure can be found by visiting:
https://www.ontario.ca/public-sector-salary-disclosure/2024/all-sectors-and-seconded-employees/
