Ontario's 2025 Sunshine List Is Out — and It's Bigger Than Ever
Ottawa and the rest of Ontario now have a fresh look at where public money goes, with the release of the 2025 Sunshine List showing more than 400,000 provincial employees earning over $100,000 a year — a number that keeps climbing as salaries rise and the threshold stays frozen where it's been since 1996.
The list, officially called the Public Sector Salary Disclosure, is released every year under Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act. It covers hospitals, universities, municipalities, school boards, Crown corporations, and other publicly funded organizations across the province.
OPG Leads the Pack
This year's top earners are a familiar crowd at the summit: all five of the province's highest-paid public servants work for Ontario Power Generation. OPG, which operates nuclear and hydroelectric facilities across Ontario including the Darlington and Pickering nuclear stations east of Toronto, consistently places executives at the top of the list given the complexity, scale, and safety demands of running the province's power grid.
Health-care executives and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) — Ontario's massive public pension board — also cracked the top 10, reflecting the significant compensation packages tied to managing billions in assets and overseeing sprawling hospital networks.
Why 400,000 Is a Record
The number of names on the list has grown dramatically over the years, and critics have long argued the $100,000 threshold no longer means what it once did. In 1996, a six-figure salary was genuinely exceptional. Adjusted for inflation, that same threshold today would sit closer to $170,000 — meaning hundreds of thousands of relatively ordinary public-sector workers now appear on a list originally designed to flag the truly top-paid.
For Ottawa residents, the list includes thousands of local employees from the City of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Health, The Ottawa Hospital, Carleton University, the University of Ottawa, and Ottawa-area school boards. Municipal managers, hospital doctors, and senior administrators from the capital show up in large numbers every year.
What It Means for Ottawa
The Sunshine List often sparks debate in Ottawa about whether public-sector pay is keeping pace with, outpacing, or lagging private-sector salaries in an increasingly expensive city. With Ottawa's cost of living climbing — housing costs in particular — some argue competitive public-sector wages are necessary to attract and retain talent. Others point to the sheer volume of names as evidence of public-sector wage growth outpacing what taxpayers can sustainably support.
Either way, the list gives Ottawa residents a rare, concrete window into how public money is allocated to the people running the city's hospitals, transit systems, schools, and government offices.
The full 2025 Sunshine List is available through the Ontario government's open data portal.
Source: Global News Ottawa
