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Taxpayer group reveals 43,000 Quebec bureaucrats earn $100,000 or more

Feb 4, 2020 | 12:47 PM

MONTREAL — A national group that lobbies for smaller government and lower taxes has calculated there are more than 43,000 Quebec public sector employees earning six-figure salaries.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation said today it hopes its findings will push Quebec to be more transparent with its spending and publish annual lists of the province’s well-paid employees, as do Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Federation spokesman Renaud Brossard says his group used the province’s access to information law to seek information from more than 2,000 government-funded bodies at the provincial and municipal level.

Brossard says 450 of them refused to fully comply with his group’s access requests, leaving 1,688 organizations from which the federation could collect data.

He said the data reveals 43,469 provincial and municipal government employees earn more than $100,000 annually, costing taxpayers roughly $5.3 billion.

Ontario’s most recent “Sunshine List,” published last March, included more than 151,000 people who earned $100,000 or more in 2018.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Feb. 4, 2020.

 

The Canadian Press