Welcome to the province that has legalized and legitimized pornography. Salary pornography, to be precise.

Society normally frowns on peep shows and public voyeurism. Except in Ontario, where it’s open season on public servants’ private lives.

Log on to any computer, draw the drapes and pore through the perverse pleasures of the now notorious “sunshine list.”

It claims to shed light on the darkest corners of the provincial bureaucracy. In reality, it stokes vilification and humiliation of frontline public servants.

Not just the fat cats at the top of the heap, but tens of thousands of dedicated professionals who serve taxpayers are now fair game: engineers, safety inspectors, university professors, school principals, specialized nurses, even some police officers.

The opposition feasts on their salaries in an annual rite. The media joins the feeding frenzy and the public laps it up.

All thanks to the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act of 1996, a.k.a. the sunshine list.

Sixteen years ago, the righteous Mike Harris pandered to his populist base by invoking the sunshine law. Under the guise of promoting transparency in government, he launched a transparently political attack on unionized civil servants and other public sector employees for whom he felt open contempt.

Henceforth, they would be singled out for notoriety because they happened to work for the taxpayers of Ontario (while most private sector salaries remain private). Transparency can be good. A truly targeted sunshine list, focusing on the top tier of public servants whose salaries merit scrutiny, makes sense.

Titillation, however, only leads taxpayers astray. When Harris set a benchmark of $100,000 in 1996, he failed to build in any inflation adjustment — knowing that annual increases would catapult growing numbers of public servants onto the list.

Now it adds up to a staggering five volumes of mostly pointless salary porn. Casting such a wide net — and letting it grow wider every year — dilutes its value.

Predictably, the opposition decries the growing number who earn more than $100,000: the total increased by 7,500 to nearly 80,000 public servants this year. Conveniently, they overlook the distorting effects of inflation.

And Premier Dalton McGuinty is complicit in Harris’s mischievous hounding of public servants. He should long ago have tied the list to the consumer price index, which would raise the salary cutoff to $139,000 — surely a more relevant benchmark.

Instead, by failing to keep up with inflation, the list is 450 per cent bigger than it would otherwise be. Three-quarters of the people now on it shouldn’t be.

Imagine if Harris had set the cutoff at $71,000 back in 1996: He would have seemed churlish, yet that’s what $100,000 in today’s dollars is worth if you allow for inflation over the past 16 years.

This is self-defeating sunshine. A bloated list also distracts us from what counts:

Why does Clifford Nordal, head of St. Joseph’s Health Care in London merit $1.45 million at a time of hospital cutbacks? Should longtime Sick Kids chief Mary Jo Haddad earn $712,000 a year while her hospital constantly hits us up for donations? Why are we buying into the fear that these CEOs would be poached, and that their hospitals would crumble in their wake?

We need a “smart shine list” that targets stratospheric CEO salaries, instead of wasting ink on the overtime bills of nurses who exceed $100,000 in a good year. It’s time for the McGuinty government to stop lumping nurses in with their bosses who earn up to 10 times more.

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As for Harris, Ontario’s former premier and putative value-for-money vigilante has been raking in about $750,000 annually as a part-time director of Magna International (before his elevation to board chairman). Yet barely a peep is heard of this in the business press, which prefers to play peeping Tom with mid-level public servants.

Sixteen years after Harris kicked off a puerile salary striptease, Premier Dad should kick the province’s pay porn habit — by raising the benchmark to $150,000 or more. The sunshine list shouldn’t be about salary voyeurism, but value for money.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, twitter.com/reggcohn.