Ontario Sunshine List: These were the top earners in 2024
Posted Mar 28, 2025 12:54:03 PM.
Last Updated Mar 30, 2025 09:08:42 AM.
Ontario’s annual sunshine list of public servants who earned $100,000 or more in 2024 was released on Friday.
The directory which discloses the names and titles of high-income workers in the provincial government, schools, hospitals, police forces and other areas of the public sector, saw a 25 per cent increase from 300,680 people in 2023 to a record 377,666 people in 2024.
The top three earners on this year’s list are all Ontario Power Generation (OPG) employees, with the top earner being former President and CEO Ken Hartwick, who earned a salary of more than $2 million – more than double the second-highest paid employee, also an OPG executive.
Former Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster, was fourth on the list with a salary of more than $883,000, and current United Health Network CEO Kevin Smith was fifth with a slightly lower salary than Verster at about $883,000.
Most of the highest-paid employees on the list are OPG executives, hospital presidents and presidents or CEOs of large agencies such as Ontario Health, the Ontario Public Service Pension Board and the Independent Electricity System Operator.
Among the other notable names on the list, Ontario Premier Doug Ford earned $209,974 which was far less than the $328,098 earned by his chief of staff, Patrick Sackville. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow made $225,093 while Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Demkiw took home $394,228.
“Nearly half the growth on the list was driven by the school board sector, with teachers contributing to 87 per cent of this increase,” Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney said in a statement.
“The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996 requires organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario to make public, by March 31 each year, the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in the previous calendar year,” she explained.
The $100,000 threshold for public sector salary disclosure came into effect in 1996 and, with inflation would be about $180,249 in 2024 dollars. About 22,530 names on the list are over that inflationary threshold.
Successive governments have declined to raise the threshold for disclosure.
