All public sector organizations in BC are required to release salaries for everyone who makes over $75k/year. They’re not, however, required to do it in machine-readable format (the legislation was written in the 80s). So the Vancouver Sun does optical-character recognition on all of it and makes it searchable online – but note, the Sun doesn’t provide a dump of their database; they’re trying to make a buck, not fix the world.

If you know managers in public organizations, it’s marginally fun to look them up. And it’s fun to look up random professors* (although it was more fun when I was a student in Ontario, where the publication cut-off is $100k). But beyond that I’m not really sure what it’s good for? The Sun has tried to do some analysis about the ballooning public service, but deep in the article they note that Ontario’s is growing at the same size. And besides, the neoconservative vision for the public service is to have a bunch of private-sector contracts overseen by a handful of highly-paid public servants.

* 50 university and college employees with a title that includes “computer science” make over $75k…51 employees with “philosophy” do.