Why is there no federal Sunshine List?

If you search this site, you will find provincial nurses, professors, police officers, and hospital executives by name. You will not find a single federal public servant. That is not a gap in our data. It is a gap in Canadian disclosure law.

Provinces disclose people. Ottawa discloses pay scales.

Provincial sunshine lists exist because provinces passed laws requiring them. Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act (1996) requires organizations that receive provincial funding to publish the name, position, salary, and taxable benefits of every employee paid $100,000 or more. BC, Alberta, Manitoba, and others followed with their own regimes, each with its own threshold.

No equivalent federal statute exists. Individual federal salaries are treated as personal information under the federal Privacy Act, which permits disclosing the salary range of a position, but not what a named individual is actually paid. So what the federal government publishes instead is the pay structure itself:

• Treasury Board rates of pay: the exact salary ladder for every classification and step (an IT-03's range, an EX-01's range), negotiated in collective agreements.
• GC InfoBase: aggregate people and spending data by department, meaning headcounts, total personnel costs, and average cost per employee. Numbers, never names.

The practical difference, side by side

In other words: provincially, you can know what your neighbour earns but may struggle to see the system; federally, you can see the whole system but never your neighbour. Each regime answers a different accountability question, and each leaves a blind spot the other covers.

So how well are federal employees paid?

The published pay scales answer that better than any sunshine list could. A senior federal IT professional or executive sits at a published range that you can compare directly against the provincial disclosure data on this site. Enter any federal pay-scale figure into Where Do You Rank? to see where it would land on a provincial sunshine list, or check the combined tax rates that apply to it.