Introduction
Welcome to SunshineLists.ca — Canada's most comprehensive source for public sector salary disclosure data, commonly known as "Sunshine Lists."
We bring together the annual salary disclosures for applicable public sector employees across all Canadian provinces and municipalities that make this information public. This includes individuals working for government ministries, agencies, municipalities, hospitals, school boards, universities, Crown corporations, and other publicly funded organizations. In cases where the disclosures include payments made to companies (e.g., vendors and suppliers of goods or services), we include that information too.
Purpose
Our goal is simple: to give every Canadian a straightforward, reliable tool to explore and understand some of the public spending within their own tax jurisdiction.
To that end, we provide easy access to search the datasets, including statistical measures such as dataset size, averages, medians, growth trends, year-over-year comparisons and in some cases, more advanced metrics as well.
As you'll see below, this website was a large undertaking and we're grateful for the positive feedback so many of our fellow Canadians have shared with us. Several provinces still release their disclosures in PDF format — often numbering in the hundreds of documents per year — and which are often scattered across multiple websites. This makes it very difficult for the average Canadian to access the data and understand its trends. We believe Canadians deserve better and that led us to build this platform.
We also recognize that our analysis is regularly used by researchers, academics, labor unions and other employee groups, as well as journalists for reporting and commentary.
Neutrality
We take the task of collecting and presenting this data seriously; our analysis is thorough and done to the best of our ability. We do not take political stances on the data nor do we provide analysis that is meant to mislead. In cases where a calculation or analysis may be considered complex, we do our best to explain the methodology. Most analyses simply involve a) identifying a subset of data which share a particular trait or traits, b) aggregating the numerical measure in question and, c) normalizing the result. This is a fancy way of saying we add up the numerators and demoninators and take ratios so you don't have to.
We leave it to Canadians to decide on what to make of the underlying data — we provide the platform and access; you decide for yourself.
Methodology
All public spending records on our website come directly from publicly available data published online by the originating public body. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any government or public body, nor do we have special access to these records beyond what is available to any member of the Canadian public.
Any Canadian with internet access and the necessary technical skills (and patience!) could reproduce our work.
Note that we do not rely upon AI models for PDF data extraction. Instead, we have built our own technology to parse PDFs which we see as necessary to ensure fidelity to the source data. In our judgement, AI models cannot be depended upon in this manner to produce reliable results. AI models also lack reproducibilty for these tasks: the same request may produce different results each time.
In addition to the programmatic checks we built into our PDF extraction technology, we also manually spot check at least 25 entires from each parsed document. This means selecting entries at random in the PDF and ensuring a match in the extracted output. This is onerous but necessary and done as a matter of principle as well.
We've built our system to detect and incorporate corrections, amendments, or deletions to the source data in a timely manner whenever they occur. This ensures our site consistently reflects the most up-to-date official record. Consequently, we are unable to accommodate direct requests to modify our data unless the change has already been made in the latest version published by the responsible public body. Any requests for corrections or errata should be directed to the government ministry, agency, or organization that originally published the list and maintains the authoritative source records (which would then flow through to our platform via our data collection process).
Thank You
We thank you for visiting our platform and hope you find it useful. In addition to the provincial and municipal pages to browse and analyze the data, we also have a inflation page which looks at the historical inflation in Canada.