NDP reveals the ludicrous justification for $760,000 Tarion CEO salary

OTTAWA – NDP MPPs have discovered the trumped-up justification for the staggering $760,000 annual paycheck for Howard Bogach, the boss of the disastrous Tarion Corporation. The Tarion CEO salary was arrived at comparing the job to the CEO salaries at Coca-Cola, Walmart and Loblaws.

“The Tarion CEO’s salary was kept secret from Ontarians for years by Liberals and Conservatives. Now we know why. His enormous salary would easily put him in the top 10 of the Sunshine List, had it been publicly disclosed,” said MPP Tom Rakocevic, the NDP Official Opposition critic for Government Services and Consumer Protection.

“Ontarians will be outraged to discover that Tarion is justifying this obviously excessive pay package by including the CEO salaries of major corporations in the comparison, like Walmart, Coca-Cola and Loblaws. This ludicrous comparison simply doesn’t make sense, and homeowners who have suffered at the hands of Tarion have been paying the price.”

Tarion has 230 employees. Walmart Canada has over 90,000 employees, Coca-Cola Canada employs over 6,000, and Loblaws has 135,000 workers. The list of comparators also includes the CEOs of Kraft Heinz, Nike Canada, PepsiCo Canada and other multi-billion-dollar private sector corporations.

In total, senior executives presiding over the Tarion mess are picking up over $4 million a year in compensation.

“Tarion has been protecting big developers at the expense of homeowners. Families have faced huge bills for leaking walls, mold or bad foundations, only to find out they’re being denied home warranty coverage by Tarion. What these huge salary numbers show is that those families’ have also been funding the pay packets of failing executives, and the justification for that is ridiculous,” said Rakocevic.

“It’s a huge disappointment that the Liberals backed this rip-off for years, and it’s shocking that the Doug Ford government is protecting Tarion now, by blocking the NDP’s efforts to scrap it in favour of a better system.”

In 2019, Rakocevic introduced a Private Member’s Bill (Bill 169) to create a new Crown agency to assume responsibility for Tarion’s existing warranties and establish a new multi-provider warranty system for homeowners. Rakocevic’s bill would see Tarion’s CEO fired now, and the company soon shut down for good.