Ex-CAO’s pay ‘adds insult to injury’

A Manitoba government deputy minister was paid by both the province and the city even though he left his civic position more than a year ago.

The city’s public disclosure compensation report revealed the extent to which two levels of taxpayers were on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary payments to Michael Jack, who is Manitoba’s deputy minister of business, mining, trade and job creation and formerly the city’s chief administrative officer.

Jack resigned as city CAO on July 15, 2024 and was paid $410,769 that year — 43 per cent more than his previous year’s salary, $286,782.

In 2025, after Jack was appointed deputy minister at a starting salary of $184,554, he also received $164,007 in compensation from the City of Winnipeg, although he did not work for the city that year.

“No Winnipegger gets to quit a job and keep collecting taxpayer-funded paycheques for a year and a half,” Gage Haubrich of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said Friday.

“It adds insult to injury that he continued to be paid by Winnipeg taxpayers while getting a salary from provincial taxpayers at the same time. That’s double dipping,” Haubrich said.

Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham owes taxpayers an explanation for why hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were sent to an employee who quit, Haubrich said from his office in Saskatoon.

“Why was Jack being paid after quitting? And why was he being paid by taxpayers twice at the same time?”

The mayor’s office deferred comment to the city’s corporate communications department.

The acting manager of corporate communications for the city said she couldn’t discuss the specifics of an individual’s compensation.

“I can tell you the figure reported for each employee may include any combination of salary and taxable benefits, overtime, retroactive pay adjustments, retirement allowance, sick pay cash out, vacation pay cash out, back pay and severance pay,” Julie Dooley said in an email.

The city’s annual compensation disclosure reports note that the amounts do not include payments made or benefits accrued in relation to pension plans.

Haubrich maintained the city is not being accountable for how it spends taxpayer money.

“Taxpayers need a real explanation and the city needs to give it — not whatever this sorry excuse for an explanation is.”

The Provincial Public Sector Compensation Disclosure Act stipulates that every year Manitoba municipalities publish a complete list of all employees and members of the governing body who received compensation of $85,000 or more in the previous fiscal year.

Jack, who was appointed Manitoba’s deputy minister of business, mining, trade and job creation on Nov. 13, 2024, did not respond to an email request for comment Friday.

He’s not alone in receiving a big payout after resigning as Winnipeg’s CAO.

In 2014, Phil Sheegl was the city’s highest paid employee, even though he’d quit in 2013.

He resigned as the police headquarters construction scandal emerged in which an audit determined the over-budget project was mismanaged. The following year, Sheegl received $250,000 in compensation, the public disclosure shows.

In a 2022 civil court proceeding launched by the city, Sheegl was found to have accepted a $327,000 bribe from a contractor. After losing an appeal, Sheegl was ordered to return the $250,000 in severance he was paid by the city plus interest, $100,000 in punitive damages and court costs at both the lower and appeal levels, totalling about $1.1 million.

In February 2015, acting CAO Deepak Joshi resigned and received $567,339 in compensation from the city, even though he’d only worked two months that year. His compensation in 2014 was $246,000.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca