Brea Lake, CEO Accelerate Okanagan

Image Credit: Submitted/Accelerate Okanagan

Is there really a Sunshine Tax in Kelowna? A tech hub is trying to answer that by compiling a database of wages and other compensation companies are offering their employees.

Accelerate Okanagan wants to give employers some basic information so they know what they’re competing against in a labour shortage, but should also tell us if Okanagan residents get paid a little less for the privilege of living here — also known as the Sunshine Tax.

“Something our team has talked a lot about is, how can you demystify the sunshine tax that you hear about here in the Okanagan and start to understand how are we standing up to these other regions,” CEO Brea Lake said. “Overall, I’m interested to see if the sunshine tax is true or not and how can we help to equip the companies so, if there is a sunshine tax, how are we paying our employees to be able to live here?”

While it’s focused on the Okanagan, Lake is encouraging participation from places like Kamloops and Salmon Arm, although on a more limited basis.

“We were trying to see if we could leverage some funding to see if we could expand the full survey to them but we weren’t able to secure it for this year,” Lake told iNFOnews.ca. “That being said, we’re still working with Kamloops Innovation and their economic development to offer this to their members. Their members will be allowed to participate free and access this data too. The hope is we’ll get more Kamloops companies filling it in because we know the need is just as true there. And the same with Salmon Arm.”

In the Okanagan the survey is open to all businesses, whether they’re in the tech sector, or any other.

There is a national company, Mercer, that does a similar survey but it is limited to companies with 100 employees or more.

The average number of employees among companies Accelerate Okanagan works with is eight.

The Mercer data is available but costs $3,000 to $5,000 and is not of much value for small Okanagan companies because it’s limited to wages in larger centres like Vancouver, Lake said.

Accelerate Okanagan, therefore, is working with BenchMarket, which conducts similar surveys on Vancouver Island and Ontario cities like Kitchener-Waterloo.

“We intentionally wanted to partner with them because we were looking for more of what I would call urban regional centres that are smaller cities that are comparable to our region,” Lake said. “Victoria and Kelowna get compared quite a bit. That’s our nearest competitor so, let’s look to what they’re doing. The hope is that, in the coming years, we can get more of these mid-sized cities on board.”

Ideally the survey will be done annually but the initial funding is only for this year. It’s being offered free but, in future years, there may be a fee attached for businesses to participate.

“It is a big ask on the company’s side,” Lake said. “They have to commit some time – about 35 to 40 minutes – to put their data in there. That’s why we felt we didn’t want to put in an ask this year around paying for it. We know that’s a huge time commitment and they will, hopefully, find enough benefit from getting this high value salary data that it was worth the time.”

The survey is time consuming because it’s asking for salary details on each employee, full-time or part-time. It also asks what other benefits are offered, such as paid time off, bonuses and stock options.

The stock option part, which applies more to tech companies, can be time consuming since all the details about how the options are offered and granted also need to be provided.

There’s even a virtual information session, especially for those who don’t have human resources staff so may have questions about things like terminology.

That’s on Sept. 22 and the survey is open until Nov. 4.

A minimum of 30 businesses are needed to make the survey statistically valid but Lake is hoping for at least 50 to join in.

Even then, the data may be limited if there are not enough people in specific job categories to make those parts statistically valid.

For more information or to take the survey, go here.

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