You may have heard the news last week that the Alberta government – that’s us, by the way – shelled out more than $3.5 million in compensation to 23 executives, directors, managers or advisors for Alberta Health in Premier Danielle Smith’s purge of people she didn’t like. While that seems like a lot of money – okay, that IS a lot of money – in the world of government salaries, those kinds of numbers get little more than a shrug.
The news of the compensation for the fired executives overshadowed the government’s release of the ‘sunshine list’ of all provincial government employees taking home more than $100,000 in salary and benefits. Now, to a guy who never made anything close to 100 grand in his career (my fault, I guess, for choosing the notoriously poorly paid field of journalism), $100,000 sounds like top dollar. I guess it isn’t, since according to the list, no less than 14,601 provincial government employees made more than $100,000. And that does not include Alberta Health, where there are some staggering numbers.
As you might have guessed, the list is littered with hundreds of managers, as well as senior managers and executive managers, although I can’t say for sure which is more important. There are plenty of titles for jobs that could only exist in the public sector. In the Advanced Education department, where there are 320 people who make more than 100 Gs, there’s a director of insight, transformation and innovation ($172,000+) and an executive director of innovation and insight ($140,000+). In the Treasury Branch, there’s a chief advisor on negotiations, who has negotiated himself a cool $215,000+ paycheque.
In Agriculture and Forestry, there are lots of people who have unique jobs, like the person listed as “Triticale/Wheat Plant Breeder” who makes $120,000. (I won’t comment on this job, because none of those words make sense to me.) The director of 4H takes home $130,000, while the farmers’ advocate made $205,000 advocating for farmers.
In the field of communications, which could be cut in half with no discernable impact on the public, there were 104 people in the 100G club. Most of them fell under the title of Director, Communications, or Communications Director. I assume there is a difference, but only government employees would be able to explain it. Six-figure pay for scribbling press releases and canned responses to media questions is why so many good people have left journalism for the cushy world of ‘coms’.
The real money , of course, is in health care. The AHS list, which is separate from the sunshine list, has some eye-popping numbers. One healthcare aide made $146,000. A lab pathologist took home $350,000 for pathologizing (I just made up that word, but it sounds good). Dozens of registered nurses made six figures thanks to lots of overtime, with the top earners making $197,000, $246,000, and $322,000. But the champion came in at $510,000! Nurses do important, vital and sometimes disgusting work, but how does one nurse take home a half-million dollars? Overtime, and lots and lots of it. CBC News calculates that the nurse would have to work 77 hours of overtime per week, every week, to make that kind of money.
We deserve an explanation as to how one registered nurse made $510,000, or $246,000, or $322,000 for that matter. Even the United Nurses of Alberta president seemed taken aback by the numbers. If these nurses are making those staggering paycheques because there is no one else around to take up the shifts, then we need to fix this. But that would require someone asking the government how this could happen.
Maybe they could get someone from communications to answer.
In This Corner 