Government employees in Ontario paid 10.3 per cent higher wages than comparable private-sector workers

TORONTO—Government employees in Ontario received 10.3 per cent higher wages on average than comparable workers in the private sector last year, and enjoyed much more generous non-wage benefits, too, finds a new study by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank. “Bringing government-sector compensation in line with the private sector would not only help governments in Ontario control spending without reducing services, it would also maintain fairness for taxpayers,” said Ben Eisen, a Fraser Institute Senior Fellow with the Ontario Prosperity Initiative. The study, Comparing Government and Private Sector Compensation in Ontario, finds that government employees in Ontario—including federal, provincial and municipal workers—received 10.3 per cent higher wages, on average, than comparable workers in the private sector in 2018. And that wage gap accounts for differences between workers in the two sectors such as age, gender, education, tenure and type of work.