If City of Toronto managers had gone on the old Oprah Winfrey Show, she could have said, “YOU get a bonus and YOU get a bonus and YOU get a bonus, EVERYBODY gets a bonus!”, without having to pay any bonuses.

That’s because Toronto property taxpayers give them a bonus ever year, to the tune of $11.3 million in 2016 alone.

Last year, of 4,400 non-union managers at City Hall, only 14 didn’t get a bonus, which came on top of the 1.25% cost-of-living increase all managers received.

The vast majority, 3,577, received a 2.5% bonus, basically for doing their jobs.

Another 671 received a 4.5% bonus for exceeding expectations and 137 received a 1% bonus for kind of, sort of, meeting expectations.

The average non union city manager received $2,526 under the bonus system last year.

As the Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy, who has been covering this issue for years, reported, bonuses are added to managers’ salaries unless they are already at the top of their wage range, in which case the money is given to them as a lump sum payment.

Clearly, this is ridiculous and wasteful to taxpayers.

In effect, the bonus system is now baked into the salaries of almost all non-union managers.

It is thus not a “bonus” system that rewards merit, but a virtually automatic pay hike.

As City Manager Peter Wallace told the budget committee Tuesday, the city’s bonus system is a failure of “Management 101”.

“We need to be looking not just at the positive (performances) but the negative (ones) as well,” he said.

Wallace promised a rigorous review of the bonus system but any changes will need the backing of council, which makes real change a long shot.

Too many councillors, who have been around City Hall far too long, have forgotten that their job is to deliver city services to taxpayers in the most efficient way at the best price.

Instead, they view City Hall as an employment agency for city employees.

The scary thing is that this bonus system is just one example of annual waste at City Hall that we know about, which raises concerns about all the waste going on that we don’t know about.