There was a small increase last year in the total number of Carleton employees making over $100,000 per year, according to Ontario’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure list released last week.
The “sunshine list” is published every year and lists the salary and benefits of every public sector employee making over $100,000. This year 645 Carleton employees made the top-earners list in 2012, marking a slight increase of approximately three per cent from 2011.
“The sunshine list is rather one-dimensional in that it only reports on salaries. The list provides no analysis whatsoever,” said Angelo Mingarelli, president of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA).
“Also, the list ignores salaries below $100,000, which does constitute a good portion of faculty at many institutions, including our own,” he said.
Carleton president Roseann Runte is the highest paid employee at Carleton, with a total salary of $358,474 and an additional $46,095 in taxable benefits.
Runte’s combined salary is comparable to that of other Ontario university presidents. She makes slightly less than presidents at the University of Toronto and University of Waterloo, and slightly more than the presidents of Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa, according to the list.
Outside of presidents and vice-presidents, the next group of highest paid positions at Carleton is generally the deans of each faculty.
Jerry Tomberlin, dean of the Sprott School of Business, is the highest paid dean at a salary of $214,270.84, reflecting a province-wide trend of higher salaries for business faculty.
The next top earning deans belong to the faculties of arts and social sciences, public affairs, and science, who all make around $200,000 or less.
The highest paid professor at Carleton is sociology and anthropology associate professor Tullio Caputo, whose total salary last year was $260,940.
“Professors’ salaries are negotiated under the terms of collective agreements, so they are all over the place,” Mingarelli said.
Excluding management employees, Mingarelli said Carleton is “on average, among the lowest paid university faculty unions in Ontario.”
When it comes to judging the fairness of wages, it can be difficult to compare the public and private sectors, where people with the same qualifications are often making more money, according to David Macdonald, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“Certainly, profs or other folks who are on the sunshine list are better paid than the average Canadian, but they are nowhere near the stratospheric levels we’ve seen for Canadian CEOs and executive pay,” Macdonald said.
