The former CEO of Shared Health saw his pay exceed $600,000 last year — a nearly 83 per cent increase from the prior year — despite only working for four months before his unexpected departure from the provincial health-care organization.
Adam Topp earned $603,604 in� 2023, according to recent compensation disclosures.
The same documents reveal some executives also claimed in the range of $30,000 to $60,000 in extra compensation, attributed at least partially to them collecting retroactive pay increases to match the raises of unionized health-care staff.
Topp led Shared Health for less than four months in 2023 before the organization described his departure as a “resignation” in a brief, two-sentence statement to media near the end of April. The announcement of his replacement — Lanette Siragusa, one of the public faces of Manitoba’s COVID-19 response — was made the next day.
Compared to the previous year, Topp’s compensation in his final year on Shared Health’s payroll grew by almost 83 per cent and was $272,865 higher in 2023 than the nearly $331,000 he had earned in 2022. His compensation in 2023 is triple the amount of Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.
The high payout suggests Topp received severance because he was fired, rather than the voluntary departure Shared Health initially suggested, according to a University of Manitoba business instructor who teaches a course on compensation.
Severance likely the result
“It would be difficult to imagine something other than they paid out the remaining term of the employment contract,” Sean MacDonald said.
A Shared Health spokesperson declined to comment on Topp’s employment terms, describing it as a human resources matter.
MacDonald said large severance payments to top executives can spark public outrage, but he said these benefits are often embedded into the employment contracts.
“I don’t think people should be immediately thinking that this is scandalous, simply because these are high numbers for the top executives.”
MacDonald said high compensation is needed to attract upper managers, and severance protects them from the risk in assuming a job they could lose suddenly.
A union leader fighting for better wages for health-care support workers doesn’t see it the same way, however.
“That’s obscene, quite frankly, compared to the two and three [per cent pay increases] that the front-line workers have received” annually, said Shannon McAteer, health-care co-ordinator for the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Manitoba.
McAteer said she understands Topp may be entitled to severance, but she’s still taken aback by how high it may have been.
Shared Health wouldn’t disclose a breakdown of Topp’s compensation and what resulted from his departure.
Topp, who led Shared Health for two years, is currently a partner in a health-care consultancy firm. He didn’t respond to a request for comment through his business.
Under Manitoba’s Public Sector Compensation Disclosure Act, government entities must each year disclose the salary of every public sector employee making more than $85,000. The total pay includes overtime, retirement/severance pay, lump sum payments, vacation payouts and benefits.
The recent compensation disclosure report for each of Manitoba’s regional health authorities also shows some executives earning tens of thousands more in 2023 than they did in 2022.
Some pay hikes for Shared Health management staff include a year-over-year increase from $205,000 to $265,000, $171,000 to $228,000 and $194,000 to $234,000. Their job titles stayed the same during this time, according to the disclosure reports.
While these documents don’t offer insight into what comprises each person’s salary, Shared Health and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said retroactive pay increases contributed to the higher earnings.
In 2023, non-unionized senior health-care officials received the same percentage increases and back pay that unionized health-care workers bargained for.
Same pay bumps to executives
The health authorities said these pay bumps match the pattern established by the seven-year contracts reached by a number of health-care unions, which won total general wage increases of 9.6 per cent before compounding. Health-care employers were subsequently on the hook to pay out years of owed wages, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, nurses received $216.7 million.
MacDonald, an instructor with U of M’s Asper School of Business, said there’s a general expectation that supervisors and managers be paid more than their employees, but he said in health care the jobs they’re doing, and their relative importance, are vastly different.
He accepts the premise some health-care managers may need a pay bump after enduring a lengthy wage freeze of their own, he said.
However, “we have to accept that the administrators are not always going to get paid more than the patient care providers. And that’s because their job is deemed, the patient care providers, as more valuable.”
MacDonald said wages are understandably rising for some health-care professionals because of high demand for these positions. The same cannot be said for executives, he said.
“You’d have to go case-by-case, but not all managers are deserving these raises.”
Manitoba’s NDP government has spoken repeatedly about its desire to cut administration costs in health care and redirect money to the front lines.
Shared Health, an organization created by the former PC government during its overhaul of health care, initially bore the brunt of the party’s pre-election criticism, but the NDP has since walked back that pledge by promising to reduce bureaucratic costs in health care more generally but not singling out the one entity.
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the government remains committed to spending less on administration.
“Heather Stefanson’s government gave big payouts to executives while patients faced longer wait times and health-care staff went years without contracts. We’ve tasked Shared Health with righting their fiscal ship, reduce their bureaucracy and to direct resources back to patients and the front lines of care,” Asagwara said in a statement.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation warned the compensation reports show the province heading in the wrong direction.
“If the government wants to actually fix health care and get more people treated and cured, it becomes difficult when they want to spend all of this money on executives and high-level bureaucrats that aren’t actually doing that curing,” said Gage Haubrich, Prairie director for the organization.
In May, Shared Health cut around 24 non-union administrative positions. It said at the time the money would be reinvested into supporting clinical teams and delivering patient care.
The former head of Manitoba Shared Health worked for only four months in 2023, but was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the previous year. A business expert says big severance payouts are part of the cost of doing business with top executives.