Fort Erie Sunshine List outpaces provincial average nearly fivefold

Sixty-one people who work for publicly funded employers in Fort Erie earned $100,000 or more in 2025, the province’s annual salary disclosure shows–15 more than the year before, and a pace of growth nearly five times the provincial average.

Ontario’s Sunshine List was released on March 27, requiring every publicly funded organization to disclose the names, salaries and taxable benefits of employees earning six figures or more.

Across Ontario, the number of public sector employees on the list grew seven per cent in 2025. Fort Erie’s count grew 32.6 per cent, from 46 to 61 employees.

Fort Erie’s list has more than doubled in size since 2018, when 22 town employees appeared on the disclosure. In 2023, 35 town employees were listed with combined earnings of $4.36 million. By 2025 the number had grown to 57, earning a combined $7.27 million.

This exceptional jump is explained by two converging forces.

The Town of Fort Erie was actively expanding its workforce through 2024 and into 2025, approving new positions in infrastructure, planning and corporate services as the municipality grew.

At the same time, the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 714–which represents the Town’s front-line staff–ratified a new three-year collective agreement on July 3, 2025, with retroactive pay for the first half of the year landing as a lump sum that pushed some salaries above the $100,000 threshold they had never reached before.

The result is a list that, for Fort Erie, now runs 19 names longer on the town’s side alone than it did a year ago, while only four employees dropped off.

At the top of the list is Chris McQueen, the Town’s Chief Administrative Officer, who earned $247,530 in 2025–an increase of $18,598 from his 2024 compensation of $228,932.

McQueen, who came to Fort Erie in May 2022 after serving as interim CAO in Norfolk County and vice president of operations at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, now earns more than any other employee across both the town and Community Living Fort Erie, the two organizations that appear in Fort Erie’s portion of the provincial disclosure.

The town’s senior leadership team all received raises in 2025, with most landing between six and eight per cent.

Below McQueen, Jonathan Janzen, director of corporate services and treasurer, earned $197,133, up 6.9 per cent from $184,292 in 2024.

Anamika Dilwaria, drector of planning and development, earned $180,089, a 7.2 per cent increase.

Kelly Michael Walsh, director of infrastructure services, earned $176,452, up 0.8 per cent–the smallest raise among the town’s directors.

Mark Schmitt, the town’s fire chief and community emergency management coordinator, earned $171,202, up 6.8 per cent from $160,243.

Lorraine Daymond, director of human resources, earned $171,202.12, one cent less than Schmitt, a figure that reflects where two senior employees sit on the same pay grid. Both saw increases of roughly the same margin.

The most striking individual number belongs not to any director but to Edward Terry, manager of policy and community planning, whose salary rose from $106,935 in 2024 to $137,619 in 2025–an increase of nearly $31,000, or 28.7 per cent.

Terry, a certified professional planner with more than 25 years of experience, led the town’s official plan review, a years-long project that resulted in a new planning document being formally adopted by council in August 2025. That document sets the framework for Fort Erie’s land use and growth for the next two decades.

His taxable benefits were essentially unchanged year over year, which rules out a single retroactive payment as the explanation. The town has not yet disclosed whether the raise reflects a reclassification, a market adjustment or a negotiated outcome.

Two new faces at the senior level account for some of the list’s most notable additions.

John Hilbing, who joined the town as its first CIO after years in IT leadership roles at Niagara Region and Niagara College, earned $160,782. The CIO title had not appeared in Fort Erie’s Sunshine List disclosures in any previous year, and Hilbing’s hire aligns with the Town’s stated ambition to modernize its technology systems.

This includes a new asset management platform, a finance system and an HR information system flagged in the 2025 capital budget.

Clare Cameron, identified as Director of Community Services, earned $155,300 in her first year on the list.

Community Living Fort Erie, a separate publicly funded organization that provides support services to adults with developmental disabilities, contributes four names to Fort Erie’s total.

Sandra Leemet, the organization’s highest earner, received $126,924 in 2025–down from $132,186 the year before. Three other returning Community Living employees all saw salaries decrease, a trend that contrasts sharply with the across-the-board increases at town hall.

The Sunshine List’s $100,000 threshold has not changed since the provincial government introduced the disclosure requirement in 1996. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would be approximately $185,000 in today’s dollars.

Some critics have argued that makes the list a less meaningful measure of executive compensation than it once was, and a more routine marker of professional salaries in fields such as planning, engineering and management.

The figures will be reviewed by town council, which is already projecting a base budget increase of 8.5 per cent for 2026.

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