Ontario is ordering the province's 24 colleges to put the brakes on new compensation packages after it appeared some had, mistakenly or otherwise, aimed to give their presidents big raises.
The Executive Compensation Program was designed to cap the salaries of the heads of major publicly funded institutions — colleges, universities and hospitals. The move to limit salaries is a result of a provincial framework aimed at placing restrictions on what executives working at Ontario's public-sector institutions can make.
The public input period on the new legislation ran from mid-December 2016 to mid-January 2017. But now, the government is ordering some colleges to pull back on the proposed salary hikes.
A big factor in determining compensation packages for the heads of institutions under the legislation is the size of the institution in question, with the leaders of larger ones being entitled to a higher salary. In determining the caps for individual institutions, governing bodies were to compare themselves to similar-sized institutions and set the cap accordingly.
However, it appears some college boards of governors didn't do that, Advanced Education Minsiter Deb Matthews said this week.
Matthews said the proposed raises that were submitted are based on unfair comparisons. She said some comparisons were made to running larger, more complex organizations.
"Quite frankly, having some of the colleges choose comparators 10 times their own size is not in the spirit of the legislation as it was intended and it's not in the spirit of what we are trying to achieve as we move toward a balanced budget," Matthews told reporters at a news conference at Queen's Park.
The Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU) also weighed in.
"Ontario’s colleges receive the lowest per-student funding of any province,” said RM Kennedy, chair of OPSEU’s College Academic Division. “College presidents should be carefully allocating the limited funds they have, but with these proposals the opposite seems to be true.
"Instead of putting money on the front lines, where it can do the most good for students, they seem to be trying to funnel as much as possible into their own pockets.”
In a news release, OPSEU said, "In many cases, the comparator groups are completely unrealistic."
"It is clear that some colleges borrowed from templates produced for larger colleges. For example, 16 colleges all listed exactly the grouping of Conestoga, Humber, Seneca, and Sheridan as their comparators. This aspirational group included colleges as small as Northern, Boréal, Canadore, and Lambton. To put this in perspective, Conestoga’s student population is nearly 10 times that of Northern’s."
Matthews ordered the boards of all of Ontario's colleges to revise the proposals for executive compensation.
It's not just colleges, hospital CEOs and university presidents were also in line for big increases.