Canadian Academics Paid Too Much, Canada's National Newspaper says.

Back in the day, when I was Head of Department at the University of British Columbia, we faced a very difficult recruiting situation. During my term, we hired (if I remember correctly) nine people, many of whom had competing offers at US institutions. At the time, the Canadian dollar was at 62 cents (US). That meant that if a candidate was offered $50,000 by a US institution, we had to offer more than CDN $75,000 to match the offer. Of course, we could (and did) point out that purchasing parity was more like 85 cents, so that a purchasing power competing offer would be more like CDN $60,000. But this argument seemed a bit abstract to most, and we ended up offering something like trading parity.

As of this morning, the Canadian dollar trades at US $ 1.05, about 70% more. Those salaries that we offered back then have increased in value, if priced in US dollars. (Purchasing parity has remained more or less steady, however, at 85 cents.) This explains a foaming-at-the-mouth blog post in the Globe and Mail this morning, excoriating Canadian universities for paying the highest salaries in the world.

Here, to illustrate, are examples from a Statistics Canada report from 2006 (when the CDN $ was trading at about 92 cents US--so you'll have to figure in five years of salary increases and another 15% increase in the value of the dollar, amounting to almost 20% in total.) I’ll give you three examples: Memorial in Newfoundland, a relatively small university in a relatively small town; the second, Waterloo, a medium size university not far from Toronto; the third, the University of British Columbia, a large urban university. The numbers are medians. They exclude medical professors and senior administrators.

 

	Memorial	Waterloo	UBC
Assistant Prof	65.8	83.7	97.1
Associate	84.8	106.2	106.8
Full	102.3	129.5	127.7

The Globe’s blogger, who looked at American salaries as well, writes:

Compare Guelph to UC Davis (which has a similar if slightly more distinguished research profile) - it's about a 10-per-cent gap in favour of Guelph.  The gap between the University of Manitoba and the University of Wisconsin (easily in the Top 10 of public universities worldwide) is slightly higher than that at between 10 and 15 per cent.  The gap between the University of Calgary and the University of Washington (another Top 10 candidate) is almost 45 per cent at the associate professor level and only somewhat smaller than that at the full professor level.