MaRS will, alas, be compelled to play the “collect the accolades” game where they will appropriate some (and sometimes all) of the credit for any company or research commercialization success story irrespective of the actual level of interaction with any people, program or service offered by it. Most media will cover these success stories as spun further reinforcing the public impression that these agencies are effective in their mandates.

I commend you for having sacrificed time, effort and risk in looking “under the hood” of the MaRS story and telling that story in an open and transparent fashion.

Luc Lalande

Regarding benchmarks, let me try to please you by using your variables: the head of the CBC makes about half what the CEO of MaRS makes, while managing about 5,000 people and assets many times what MaRS manages. And most of other heads of public bodies also make much less, while managing more people and more assets. Just take a look at the Sunrise report – it doesn’t seem you have.

What would really be off would be comparing the salary of MaRS CEO to that, say, of a CEO of a food retailer or a partner a major law firm. Oh, wait, that’s what you did. Now I’ll have to understand how that works, because generally speaking those people get decades of experience and success before moving into those roles, and respond to actual customers, not the taxpayers. Now in MaRS’s case, the CEO comes from a failed VC fund and basically has no entrepreneurial success behind her. She’s married to the head of UofT who incidentally was also the chair of the medicine department at UofT when MaRS was created (with extensive help from, guess who… UofT!). In fact, applying MaRS’s own recruiting criteria, she would not have been hired. Additionally, she does get paid by us, not any customers, and her salary has no relationship to her performance. In those situations, one sets the salary at the lowest point possible to get the right person in the job. Ask around and you’ll see that you could easily find someone like that for less than $250-300K.

Your suggestion about following the democratic process is interesting and certainly does not preclude spreading the word. You’ll be happy to know that, along with others, I already wrote to my MPP, as well relevant ministries, and the matter was of no interest to them as they do not concern enough people and there is no process to manage salaries at crown corporations and publicly-funded nonprofits. Which brings us back to MaRS being an unknown brand locally. So now I am trying to make sure it gets known.

As to why a PM’s salary is a comparison benchmark is unclear to me. I believe Supreme Court judges are better compensated than the Prime Minister and even then their compensation is low compared to what a CEO of a food retailer or a partner a major law firm make. I really don’t see a connection. 51 direct reports is one part of the equation; the assets under management is another dimension.

There are complex factors that weigh in when determining executive compensation, it is not as simple as comparing it against the compensation of an arbitrary political leader. So the assertion that the stated salary is “grotesque” may not hold although I do realize many people, especially early on in their careers, will find the amount to be high or very high.

Now, I am not sure where I implied that the public should blindly trust some “enlightened aristocracy” to run the public “through the night”. It sounds a bit like quoting from Leon Trotsky’s speeches

If I were you, I would follow the democratic path: I would simply write a letter to my provincial member of parliament perhaps with a follow up to a provincial auditor outlining the key concerns in factual, dispassionate way. Having some signatures from individuals who feel equally strong about the alleged misdeeds at the agency would help make your case stronger.

While blogs are a useful mechanism for communicating thoughts of public concern, they do not require elected officials to act. A direct letter to a member of the parliament becomes an official record one cannot easily ignore (ignoring a letter from a constituent is admission of a decision not to act, which in itself may have political consequences later on).

All the best!
Michael