Shine bright like a public sector employee salary disclosure list

Get that bread, young academic

I’m not on the Sunshine List. I’ve been in academia in general for 15 years, but I’ve only been paid for about 10 of those. For the first few of those 10 years, my contracts were short and demanding. I made a decent wage as a teaching assistant and a researcher on occasion, but the hours were long and the tasks were intensive. When I managed to scoop up instructor jobs, my responsibilities increased but my pay somehow seemed to decline. I mean, TAs get to refuse work once they’ve hit their allotted hours, but the remaining work then gets put upon the instructor, whether they’re tenured/tenure-track or on contract. There were points during remote learning where I was writing lectures, recording them, editing the recordings, putting the recordings up online, marking student assignments, responding to their emails, holding Zoom office hours, planning final exams, and writing letters of reference. Out of curiosity, I did a little math and found out that, by the end of that contract, I was making less than half minimum wage.

Presently, I’m surviving off a 24-month Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant worth a total $90,000. I’m happy to have the opportunity to write and research for two years, but the rising cost of living has made it more and more challenging to budget. Regardless, I fall about $55,000 of yearly income short of making it onto the Sunshine List. And my funding comes from a federal agency, not the province, but you get my point.

Maple-dipped money talk

Canadians get weird about discussing money. It is one of those little cultural quirks that seems like a prudish oddity until you consider it for more than 30 seconds and realize that it might have more to do with imposing a set of values on a population so they don’t get all disgruntled and hold a general strike than anything. Can’t get agitated if you don’t know just how much the boss is making! Banks and trade groups love asking about how comfortable people are discussing money because that makes for a great marketing angle (“Canadians can’t talk about money, but you can feel confident discussing your finances with Greenwashing Bank’s Trusted Registered Financial Healer™ - Pride Edition. Greenwashing Bank: A Bank That Cares©™®”). But the polls do give us some insight, like how 25% of Canadians have a difficult time discussing money, only half are okay discussing their wage, and that older generations have a much harder time talking about anything to do with money, even with their partners. I don’t see the problem with discussing money and wages because, and I know this might be a shocker, I don’t believe money is the only thing that matters.

Still, I’ve always been a little weirded out by the “Sunshine List”. As with most weird things in Ontario, the list was a project of Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservatives. A year after they swept the province, Harris’s government introduced The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996, which required any government employee making over $100,000 to be put on a list with the intention of encouraging right-wing groups and citizens to keep tabs on how much taxpayer money was being spent on public servants. A dash of right wing populism, a sprinkling of resentment, a tablespoon of folksy everyman hostility to government, and one eye of newt. Basically how every Tory bill is drafted.

In the 27 years since we’ve had the Sunshine List, groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other conservative entities have treated the release of this information like a holiday. But not a fun one like Halloween or Cosmonautics Day. A weird one like Groundhog Day. News about the salary disclosures is everywhere for a few days before burrowing back underground, hiding until called upon to pop up, observe its shadow, and tell us if we have to endure six more weeks of fiscal conservatism.

How Hamilton Spends

For all the weirdness about the Sunshine List, it does give a good insight into public priorities. Hamilton’s entries for 2022 show where our priorities are and how we might navigate public spending in the future.

There are 2,208 folks paid by the City of Hamilton on the 2022 Sunshine List. These are folks at city hall, in the Hamilton Police Service (HPS), the HSR, the Hamilton Fire Department (HFD), and relevant agencies. The total of their salaries and benefits combined is just shy of $280,000,000.

The top paid official in Hamilton is the Medical Officer of Health, who earns close to $350,000. As a medical doctor, this makes sense, as that’s near the average of what a medical doctor in Ontario would make.

Of the top 10 paid employees on the list, five are from the “city” proper - in public health or municipal governance-related jobs like City Manager. Four are from the HPS, including two deputy chiefs. And the last is a paramedic, which is a role overseen by the HFD.

Close to 800 of the folks on the list - around 35.8% - are with the HPS. The job that pops the most on the list for Hamilton is HPS Constable. It appears 351 times. The average salary is $121,624.50 and the total of all 351 listed Constables is $42,690,210.33.

Five of the top 10 careers which appear most frequently on Hamilton’s list are with the HPS: Constable, Sergeant, Detective, Captain, and Staff Sergeant.

These numbers break the issue down to an individual level, but we need to take a step back and look at the HPS as a whole. The 2022 HPS budget called for $126,459,121 to be spent on staff wages, a 2.45% increase from 2021. Overall staff costs were $172,944,044 in 2022. The total budget adds another $10,000,000 on top of that. And, this year, the HPS has asked for a 6.71% increase.

Let’s see what that means for an individual tax bill. The average sale price of a home in Hamilton is around $807,485 at the moment. That means you pay $6,225 a year in municipal property taxes. 14% of that - the largest single item - goes to the HPS.

Cops get cash, students get squat

During this week’s budget meetings, there was a lot of posturing on the part of the so-called “fiscal hawks”. Two of Joey Coleman’s tweets really summarize the shallowness of the “fiscal prudence” message coming from council’s right wing:

Ward 5’s Matt Francis is on record as opposing the budget because of the tax increase and the spending priorities of council. He even voted against giving summer students a living wage. But he enthusiastically supported the HPS budget.

At some point, we’re going to have to ask ourselves if this is sustainable. Some councillors are willing to stiff students who are expected to take care of kids, plant trees, cut grass, serve as lifeguards, lead summer programing, and wander around the city surveying angry business owners (like I did!). Then they turn around and give an enthusiastic thumbs up to a nearly 7% increase to the police budget.

Council has been told the city’s homelessness situation had reached “dystopian” levels. The average rent in the city is nearly $1,900 a month. Our infrastructure, purposefully underfunded for years, is crumbling. Social service agencies are fleeing. Community and faith-based groups are taking on more and more responsibilities. Councillors can’t even get the staff they need to respond to resident concerns.

Council’s right wing - Matt Francis, Tom Jackson, Brad Clark, Jeff Beattie, and Mike Spadafora - were all among those who both supported the police budget, but voted against the overall budget in the name of fiscal conservatism. In reality, what they voted for is a city that is heavily policed and under resourced. A city that considers some professions are more worth of funding than others. A city that chooses to stick with an expensive old way of doing things instead of trying something new.

Next year, a new Sunshine List and a new municipal budget will come forward. I hope we’ve moved past these tired, old debates by then. But, if history teaches us anything, its that we can have all the disclosure and budgetary posturing in the world, and it still won’t change a thing.

Poll the vote

Oh boy, do I ever love some poll-by-poll data!

When each of us head off to vote, we are assigned to a polling division that is usually a geographically-defined section of an electoral district with a certain number of voters for whom specific electoral resources are allocated. That’s a fun PhD way of saying that you and your neighbours are assigned to two or three elections workers who will check your paperwork, hand you a ballot, and make sure the voting process goes smoothly. These divisions also help campaigns know where to canvass and how to manage their election day activities to ensure they get all their voters to the polls.

The data that comes from the polling-level returns is super helpful for understanding a community and the way they responded to an election.

The poll-by-poll results dropped from the March 16th Hamilton Centre By-election and, as any huge nerd political geographer would, I mapped them to give us an idea of how the vote broke down.

Sarah Jama’s successful campaign swept the riding, winning every formal poll. Deirdre Pike’s 2nd place finish was helped along by success in a few of the institutional polls (held in City Housing and retirement communities). And the 3rd place finisher, Tory Pete Wiesner won a single poll, namely the Parkview Nursing Centre across from Victoria Park in Strathcona. The most interesting poll was Poll 1, located between Aberdeen and the Escarpment in Kirkendall, where Jama beat Pike by a single vote: 37.7% to 37.6%.

Pike’s campaign was the only to improve on a party’s performance in the 2022 General Election, earning 7% higher than the OLP candidate Ekaterini Dimakis could last June.

Isolating the OLP vote, the most impressive poll is the aforementioned Poll 1. But the result was mixed, with Pike’s campaign earning as little as 7.7% of the vote in Poll 36, which covered much of Beasley and some of Landsdale. There, the Tories pulled in second, far behind the NDP, while the Greens were just 6 votes shy of overtaking Pike’s campaign.

Speaking of which, the Greens had a tough time campaigning this time around, despite having a very dynamic and well-spoken candidate in Lucia Iannantuono. Their best major poll was 26 in Delta West (to the east of Gage Park), where they pulled in over 10% of the vote. Pike also performed well here, speaking to a significant split in the vote in the southeast corner of the riding.

The big story is the dismal turnout. Just a hair shy of 22%. And low turnout always impacts NDP campaigns disproportionately. For a reflection on just how dramatic that impact was, take a look at this map.

Okay, so this map is showing the percent of the vote the NDP picked up or lost in 2023. Not raw %, but percent of the vote. So if the NDP won 100 votes in a particular poll in 2022 and only won 50 votes in that same poll in 2023, they would have lost 50% of their vote. That’s what this map is showing. The NDP lost a percent of its vote across nearly all of the western portion of the riding, from James Street to the 403. Big pick-ups in Beasley, Blakely, and Crown Point were offset by big declines in Kirkendall, Durand, and the Delta.

What does this mean? Well, it is hard to tell. Simply put, by-elections are weird. Some pundits claim they are a test of a government’s approval, but it was almost hilariously unlikely that Hamilton Centre would have elected a Tory even if the current government’s approval rating hasn’t been slipping since Ford was re-elected last year. The last provincial Tory elected in Hamilton Centre was Ada Pritchard in 1963.1 This particular by-election also can't really be considered a test of a party's strength, since the OLP has no leader, the Greens spent the better part of the past few months contending with the fact that their leader might want to be the OLP leader, and the NDP only anointed Marit Stiles as leader days before the election was called. Every party was still in recovery from the general election. The far-right Christian Nationalist outfit that is the Ontario Party couldn't even put up a candidate. The New Blue gang of anti-drag, anti-CRT, anti-vax, anti-fun, anti-frolicking, anti-everything folks pulled in under 150 votes for their Action4Canada-member candidate.

And the Tories, for all their blustering and scheming and plotting, were apparently so disinterested in the campaign, that their signs remained up until two weeks after election day. The sign pictured below only came down today.

Berlin, McMaster, Earth

Berlin is a huge city. Almost 3.7 million people in the city itself and 6.1 million in the metro area. Berlin is so big, it is actually a city state within Germany. Like if Toronto or Montreal were their own provinces. So when Berliners vote in their municipal elections, they’re voting for members of the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus or “House of Deputies” using a Mixed Member Proportional system with parties and organized campaigns.

The Berlin election on September 26, 2021 was a complete disaster. Ballots were delivered to the wrong electoral districts if they were delivered at all, people waited for over an hour and a half, and a marathon through the city created transportation chaos that made an already complicated election even more difficult. Berliners were voting in federal elections, choosing small local bodies, and were casting ballots in a referendum on expropriating the property of any landlord body with more than 3,000 units (!!!). But the electoral confusion saw the chief electoral officer resign and German courts nullify the municipal election results.

In the two years of legal battles and bureaucratic confusion that ensued, the popularity of Germany’s governing centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD auf Deutsch) began to slip, the country faced a gas crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and the climate situation continued to deteriorate.

Climate activists grew worried that voters in Berlin, given a chance for a do-over, would opt for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or give more seats to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which would put the city’s ambitious target of becoming carbon neutral by 2045 in jeopardy (unsurprisingly, they did just that). But they were inspired by the success of the aforementioned landlord referendum, so they pushed for another vote on a new climate plan that would accelerate that plan by 15 years, giving Berlin 7 years to become a carbon neutral city.

That referendum was held this past Sunday. Despite opposition from all major parties, including the German Green Party, the proposal received support from 51% of voters. Unfortunately, the referendum required 25% of the electorate to endorse it and, because of low turnout, that threshold was not met.

But the support of the electorate is important. It shows that people are on-board with pushing hard on climate goals. And that folks haven’t totally given up on…you know…the planet Earth.

Which is what makes the MacDivest protest so inspiring. A group of McMaster students staged a hunger strike to protest the university’s plan to start up a couple of natural gas-burning generators near campus. While the strike ended after eight days, the student protestors made some excellent points about how the university has sought to put a positive spin on their investment portfolio changes while still pursuing on-campus policies that are harmful to the environment.

The outpouring of community support for the protestors was inspiring to see, and hopefully McMaster begins pursuing policies that are more ambitious than simply shifting some investments around.

My mountain for a kingdom

As reported by Joey Coleman during the Wednesday discussion re: Councillor Esther Paul’s conflict of interest saga, Ward 8 councillor J.P. Danko launched into a strange attack on Ward 2 councillor Cameron Kroetsch, accusing his colleague of trying to discredit a number of high-profile area Liberals. The threat of an Integrity Commissioner complaint seems like a colossal waste of taxpayer money on a whole lot of nothing, since Councillor Pauls did act unethically, regardless of what you think about her politics.

I dunno, man. The #HamOnt rumour mill has been abuzz for years regarding the ambition of the Dankos. Even during a meeting last year where I advocated against a ban on campaign lawn signs, a community proponent from the Conservatives made a few subtle digs at J.P. Danko for his ties to the Hamilton Mountain Liberal establishment. Coming out swinging against a genuine progressive (and, full disclosure, a good friend of mine) is a weird strategy, but given the extremely open nature of the Hamilton Mountain OLP nomination for 2026, not entirely unsurprising.

How west is your dale?

100 years and 1 day ago, there was a raucous party down at the Royal Connaught. Over 6,000 people gathered to celebrate the evolution of a Toronto developer’s ambitious new project. That evolution was giving a name to something that had started a decade prior and would reshape the City of Hamilton forever.

In 1911, J.J. McKittrick bought up huge swaths of land beyond the Chedoke Creek, hoping to capitalize on Hamilton’s incredible growth. A year later, McKittrick pitched the idea for a new community, complete with its own commercial centre, schools, churches, and parks. Served by the city’s expanding streetcar network, it would offer housing for people of all incomes (though property ownership would be restricted to white, Northern European, non-Jewish settlers only). By 1914, the land had been annexed and the project was full steam ahead.2

The 1913 plans for the new development show the original proposed name: Hamilton Gardens. A fairly standard grid of housing with an option for a Mount Royal-style circular development where Mac is now and a hydro electric line running into Dundas. Note that today’s Ainslie Wood north was the site of a proposed cemetery, likely an expansion of the Binkley Family cemetery presently there.

The plans became more ambitious as interest grew, and a re-imagined plan was presented in 1921, albeit one lacking a definitive name.

This new plan features some of what we know today, as well as a few other distinct commercial centres. An hourglass-style mix of churches and shops would lead to Dundas and to another small commercial centre or parkette, all on the grounds of today’s McMaster. This plan also hopped the Hamilton-to-Dundas streetcar line that is today’s Coote’s Drive (note to self: bring back streetcar to Dundas) and would have bled into today’s Ainslie Wood North and University Gardens (hey, at least something’s named after a garden!).3

To drum up interest in his new development, in 1923, McKittrick’s company sent a flyer to every Hamiltonian listed in the phonebook. From historical records, it apparently asked recipients “Did you ever name a baby?”4 Creepy. A month later, a follow-up flyer clarified the contest, letting Hamiltonians know that they could help pick the name for McKittrick’s new development. Some of the front-runner names were “Vimy Ridge” (it was 1923, remember), “Woodlands Park” (despite the fact that there already was a Woodlands Park in Hamilton), and “Bridgeton” (that one doesn’t roll off the old tongue now, does it?).

A panel of judges considered all the suggestions, but ultimately picked the name put forward by one Reverend Percival Spencer. At that big party, the judges told the assembled crowd of excited Hamiltonians that the city’s newest neighbourhood would be named…Westdale. Upon announcing the name, one of the judges told the Spec that “We think we are naming a city…in the future, Westdale will be just as important to Hamilton as Westmount is to the city of Montreal.”5 Gives a little hint as to what the McKittrick folks were thinking back then.

It has been 100 years since Westdale got its name. And I, for one, think it was a great choice. Now all we need to do is bring back those streetcars and we’re golden.

Cool Facts for Cool People

• Olivia Chow is seriously considering a run for Toronto mayor. Chow would be the highest-profile candidate in the race. Hopefully learning a thing or two from 2014, Chow could run a really interesting progressive campaign and be the unifying force the city’s left needs. With MPP Mitzie Hunter announcing she’s entering the race, the Toronto mayoral by-election ballot is looking like it’ll be loooooooooooooooooong.

• 831 and 781 Main Street East are two apartment buildings in Hamilton that are just begging to be turned into co-ops. Like, these are perfect. The fact that I don’t have $10,000,000 at my disposal to scoop these bad boys up and start transitioning our housing market into something more ethical and human-focused is wildly frustrating.

• The Elders for Climate Sanity are holding a rally at 70 King Street West in Dundas to protest RBC’s investment in fossil fuels. It’ll be at noon on April 1. Should be a fun time, and that’s not an April Fool’s joke!.

It’s a late one this week, folks! I’ve been busy with academic work and family stuff. Hopefully y’all enjoyed this edition. See everyone in April!