More than 1,300 Nunavut gov't employees made over $100k in 2023

The number of Nunavut government employees making over $100,000 in base salary has climbed significantly in recent years, with 1,319 employees making that much or more last year.

That's more than double the number of employees who earned six-figure salaries in 2018.

Top earners in 2023 included seven deputy ministers, former Qulliq Energy Corporation (QEC) president Rick Hunt and his interim replacement William Nippard, Nunavut Housing Corporation president and CEO Eiryn Devereaux and John Quirke, the clerk of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly.

They had a salary range of between $239,679 and $299,599.

Nunavut is one of several jurisdictions in Canada that doesn't release so-called "sunshine lists" — lists of public sector employees earning more than $100,000. CBC News filed an access to information request for this information.

Salaries trending upward

Between 2018 and 2021, the percentage of territorial employees earning six figures increased.

In 2018, roughly 10 per cent of employees made at least $100,000. In 2019, that climbed to just over 16 per cent. Over the following two years, it only changed slightly.

As of Oct. 1 this year, unionized employees are set to receive a nine per cent pay increase.

During the 2024 spring sitting of the legislature, then-Human Resources minister David Akeeagok said that was part of an "intentional salary philosophy" that the government was adopting for the first time.

"This represents another step towards the government of Nunavut becoming an employer of choice," he said.

MLAs weigh in

In 2016, the territorial government worked on legislation to create a "Sunshine List". Most provinces in Canada have similar lists now, though none of the territories do.

But Nunavut's legislation never came to fruition, and there has been no visible progress on it since 2018, when CBC News last disclosed information on the salaries of Nunavut government employees.

CBC News wrote to the territory's 22 MLAs to get their opinions on a potential public salary disclosure.

Five responded, with four saying they would be in favour.

"I believe it is necessary for all levels of government to be transparent and provide sufficient details on how public funds are expensed," wrote Adam Arreak Lightstone, the MLA for Iqaluit-Manirajak, in an emailed response.

Lightstone acknowledged there are details that would still need to be worked out, saying the issue is more complex in Nunavut than other Canadian jurisdictions.

"The privacy of personal information such as salary, especially in small communities, must be carefully balanced with the need to be open and transparent," he wrote.

He pointed to the government's most recent public service annual report from 2021-22, which shows the average base salary for government employees was $97,170 as of March 31, 2022.

"This means that over half of the GN's workforce makes over this amount," he said.

Lightstone said that base salary doesn't include the Nunavut Northern Allowance, a benefit the government offers its employees to help cover the higher cost of living in the territory.

"The government of Nunavut will have to take that into consideration when they determine how to implement public salary disclosure, whether going to the Ontario 'Sunshine List' threshold of $100,000, or taking the Nova Scotia approach and essentially disclosing every employee's salary as included in their public accounts," he wrote.

Tununiq MLA Karen Nutarak had a dissenting opinion.

"It is not the public's business to know what [a] GN employee [makes]," she said in an email.

Where it all began

The first Canadian jurisdiction to introduce a public salary disclosure was Ontario in 1995, with the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act.

"It seems as if the intention of the act was to introduce political pressure that would limit the growth of public sector employees' salaries," said Frances Woolley, an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, in an email to CBC News. "However there's no evidence that it was effective in doing so."

Woolley said an unintended consequence of the Sunshine List was reducing gender-based salary inequality among the province's university professors.

"Women who were being paid less than their male colleagues could find out about it — and complain," she wrote.

But there are also drawbacks to releasing such information, such as personal privacy.

"Privacy concerns will be more salient in Nunavut, where communities are small and close-knit," she wrote, adding that a disclosure list could impact interpersonal relationships in communities. 

"I have seen at a personal level the impact that finding out about salary anomalies — discovering that one is paid less than a colleague who is no more qualified or productive than you are — can do [to] one's morale and sense of well-being."

That's something a Nunavut government employee brought up in April to a meeting of the legislature's standing committee on oversight of government operations and public accounts, when he said the government did discuss potential disclosure in the past.

"We wanted to find out what considerations we should make according to Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and there were serious concerns posed at that time," said Mark Witzaney, the director of access to information and privacy protection for the Department of Community and Government Services. 

"We're talking about things like damage to a relationship between family members, financial loss, and those sorts of things that are spelled out specifically in the legislation as concerns or as harms that are possible should personal information be released."

Witzaney said as a result of those concerns, they took "a step back" in 2017 and "decided to hold off for the time being."

But discussions seem to be taking place once again.

In a statement to CBC News, Premier P.J. Akeeagok said they are working on "how to best disclose information to Nunavummiut without unnecessarily compromising the privacy of individual employees."