LILLEY: Report shows Ontario government workers are very well paid afterall

It certainly pays to work for the government in Ontario.

A new report from the province’s Financial Accountability Office shows that while provincial civil servants don’t make as much money on average as municipal or federal workers, they are much better paid than private sector workers.

The report shows that the average provincial civil servant earned $69,259 in 2021. That compares to $70,418 on average for municipal workers and $89,574 for federal workers, but just $59,123 for private sector workers.

Looks like all those complaints of the Ford government having a “low wage policy” was just civil servants or their NDP allies comparing themselves to federal workers.

The report does show that the average wage in what the FAO calls “Other Provincially Supported Organizations” such as long-term care homes, universities or childcare centres is lower, coming in at an average of $50,970. Yet when it comes to the core public service, government workers are much better paid in Ontario than the average private sector worker.

Provincial civil servants earn 17% more than private sector workers on average, municipal workers earn 19% more and federal workers 51% more on average.

This isn’t a shock to anyone who has followed these issues for years. We’ve long known that civil servants are better paid than the majority of workers who foot the bill for their generous salaries. They also have perks that the rest of us simply can’t get such as lavish benefit plans or pensions that make their private-sector counterparts look pale by comparison.

A 2020 report from the Fraser Institute found that government workers take an average of six extra personal days off per year compared to their private-sector counterparts. In addition, public sector workers are much more likely to have a pension plan — 87.7% of government workers have a pension plan compared to 22.5% of private sector workers.

Government workers also retire on average 2.4 years earlier.

1. Bill 124 overturning would cost Ontario $8.4B for public sector wages: FAO

2. LILLEY: Ford government's surplus is pure luck but NDP wants a deficit

That same Fraser Institute study even looked at wages for similar jobs and still found government workers earned more.

“After controlling for factors like gender, age, marital status, education, tenure, size of firm, job permanence, immigrant status, industry, occupation, province, and city, the authors found that Canada’s government-sector workers (from federal, provincial and local governments) enjoyed an 9.4% wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts in 2018,” the study found.

Provincial workers may complain about the cap on wage growth over the past three years thanks to Bill 124, but they still received an annual increase of 1% and could still climb through the seniority ladder of their pay grid. That’s more than some private-sector contracts were able to get over the past several years and as the numbers show, civil servants already have it pretty good.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

Bill 124 is being allowed to fade away, but we’ll still hear lots about it as contract talks heat up. Ignore the claims that the Ford government is being cheap, that they are chasing people away from government work due to low wages, that these workers are somehow impoverished.

We all want more money, we would all love to get a big raise – especially those of us in the private sector. Someone has to pay the bills, though, and right now, government workers are asking the rest of us to fork over more of our money for their bigger, fatter salaries.

That’s the truth the public sector unions don’t want you to know.

blilley@postmedia.com