Spreading The Golden Sunshine

"This is a government that wants people in Ontario to believe that they have effectively dealt with salaries in the broader public sector. They haven't and this is the proof that they haven't, and this is the reason why we say we need a legislated mandatory wage freeze."
Peter Shurman MPP, Progressive Conservative finance critic

Ontario has seen the loss of a massive number of manufacturing jobs since 2008. The province has a 7.7% unemployment rate. Statistics Canada lists almost four million men and women over the age of 15, that are not in the labour force from a total of eleven million eligible workers. People who have lost employment through the disappearance of their manufacturing jobs have found difficulty finding new employment.

Those who go through Ontario-government-sponsored re-training programs are about 50-thousand in number out of an estimated 300,000 unemployed former factory workers, and there are no available provincial statistics to indicate how many of those re-trained workers have been successful in finding jobs. Once their search has proven unfruitful many move on to employment insurance, and after that public welfare.

Despairing at not being able to find employment commensurate with skills and expectations, many people simply drop out.

The current Liberal government party in Ontario has undergone a change in leadership but in effect, it is the same tired old gang of MPPs who are pulling the levers and making government policy. None of which appears to have successfully made much of a different in the prevailing unemployment rates. But there's good news: government itself, using tax-funded monies employs over a million people.

There are those employed in law, medicine, academics, in routine public social service, as well as business enterprises, and they do very well, thank you, for themselves. Wages and vital union-bargained extras like vacation and sick days, retirement funds and other items that make up the richness of a public service job make for a secure working environment and surely much job satisfaction.

Particularly if those public service sector workers are among the 88,412 identified through Ontario's "sunshine list" of yearly revelations regarding salaries that reach $100,000 and just go on reaching. Ontario Power Generation pays its chief executive officer $1.7 million and Hydro One CEO $1.04 million. Doctors, nurses, teachers, police, firefighters and other public servants are all included in the $100,000-or-over category of earnings.

The numbers have grown since 2008 by 38%, courtesy of the Ontario Liberal government's eye on prudence and dispensing the taxpayer's dollar. Ontario, lest we forget, is burdened with a $12-billion deficit. The number of high earners on the public purse climbed by 11% over last year. Employees at CTV, public libraries, the provincial transportation agency, the air ambulance service, all did exceptionally well.

"It is still our policy that we need to look at that (generous compensation packages), and we will take action", Ontario's brand new Premier Kathleen Wynne, of the same old Liberal government said when it was pointed out to her that some public CEOs are receiving raises larger than the average single-parent family earner will take home in a year of toil.