The Vancouver Sun has just sent a message over Twitter saying it will soon make it easy to discover individuals' public-sector salaries.

I smiled when I read this because I used to teach Kwantlen Polytechnic University students how to do this.

I quit teaching investigative journalism when I became editor of the Georgia Straight in 2005. My replacement at Kwantlen was Vancouver Sun reporter Chad Skelton.

Under the Financial Information Act, public bodies in B.C. must publish annual statement of payments to suppliers of goods and services.

These documents also include salaries and expenses for employees earning $75,000 or more per year. (Vanoc does not fall under the Financial Information Act.)

Below, you can see links to public-sector salaries within various organizations that are covered under the act. You can search the documents by hitting “control-f” or by hitting the binoculars icon within the document.

Government of British Columbia
City of Vancouver
Metro Vancouver
TransLink
City of North Vancouver
District of North Vancouver
West Vancouver  City of New Westminster
City of Surrey

The more interesting salaries, however, can be found at www.sedar.com, which features high-flying corporate compensation packages. There, you can search by company, then look for either the "management information circular" or the "proxy statement to shareholders" or the "annual information form".

This is where you'll see, for example, that the CEO of Canwest MediaWorks, Dennis Skulsky, collected $650,000 in the past year along with a bonus of $498,938. Canwest MediaWorks owns the Vancouver Sun.

Leonard Asper, CEO of the parent firm Canwest Global Communications Corp., was paid $900,000 and collected a bonus of $153,780. That was a sharp drop from last year's bonus of $1,173,745.

Today, Canwest Global Communications Corp. shares closed at 54 cents on the Toronto Stock Exchange, down from the 52-week high of $7.50.

Under the stewardship of Asper and Skulsky, shares in Canwest Global have lost more than 95 percent of their value during the past two years, and yet their incomes still exceed those of any public-sector employee in the province.