About Open Compensation

Why this site exists

Canadian governments already publish who is paid what with public money — that is the point of sunshine lists and physician payment disclosures. But the publications themselves are scattered across annual PDFs, per-employer spreadsheets, and one-off data releases that are difficult to search, impossible to compare across years, and effectively invisible to the people they are meant to inform.

Open Compensation collects those official disclosures into one place, keeps every record traceable to its government source, and adds the tools the source publications lack: search, year-over-year history, rankings, percentiles, and plain-language reporting.

Where the data comes from

Every record on this site is republished from an official government disclosure under its open licence. We do not collect private information about anyone. Current sources:

• Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure ("Sunshine List")

  Published annually by the Government of Ontario under the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996, covering employees paid $100,000 or more. Our archive spans 1996 to the current release.

• British Columbia public sector compensation disclosures

  Statements of Financial Information (SoFI) and executive compensation disclosures published by BC public-sector employers, aggregated from the provincial open-data catalogue and employer filings.

• Manitoba Public Sector Compensation Disclosure

  Annual disclosures published under Manitoba's Public Sector Compensation Disclosure Act, covering employees paid $85,000 or more.

• Alberta Public Sector Body Compensation Disclosure

  Disclosures published under Alberta's Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act. Some Alberta datasets are position-based rather than name-based, following the province's own publication practice.

• BC Medical Services Plan "Blue Book" physician payments

  The MSP Financial Statement supplement that BC publishes each year as a PDF, listing gross fee-for-service payments to enrolled practitioners. We digitize each annual PDF into a searchable, multi-year database — our archive currently covers 2012 through the latest release.

• Manitoba physician payments (Public Accounts)

  Fee-for-service payments to physicians as published in Manitoba's annual Public Accounts, digitized from the source PDFs.

• Ontario physician billings (freedom-of-information records)

  Historical top-billing physician data originally released through freedom-of-information requests and published by Canadian news organizations. Ontario does not routinely publish named physician billings.

• Statistics Canada Census (2016 and 2021)

  Income, housing, and demographic context for cities and neighbourhoods, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.

Methodology

Where a government publishes machine-readable data, we import it directly. Where it publishes only PDFs — the BC Blue Book and Manitoba's Public Accounts — we digitize each release and verify totals against the source document. Physician specialty information is matched from the public registries of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and of Manitoba. Percentiles and rankings are computed from the disclosed figures; inflation adjustments use Statistics Canada CPI. When a source corrects a record, we update ours to match.

Independence and funding

Open Compensation is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, funded by, or endorsed by any government, union, employer, or advocacy group. The site is supported by advertising and by paid custom data work (see our rate card). Advertisers have no access to our data pipeline and no influence over what we publish.

Privacy commitments

We publish only what governments have already disclosed by law: names, pay, role, employer, and (for physicians) practice city and specialty. We never publish personal addresses, property information, or photographs of individuals. Corrections and privacy requests go to privacy@opencompensation.org — full details in our privacy policy.

Contact

Questions, corrections, media inquiries, and partnership requests: see the contact page. We aim to respond within two business days.