The board chairs of BC’s six health authorities saw their compensation rise by more than 50% in 2023/24 fiscal year. 📷 Interior Health/Fraser Health/Vancouver Island Health/Vancouver Coastal Health/X/Provincial Health Services Authority
The provincial government quietly handed massive raises to dozens of hand-picked health authority board members last year.
The hike allowed some board directors to make as much as $2,000 for each day of meetings, and caused the average daily wage of health authority board directors to increase by 53% compared to the previous year.
The pay increases came after a little-noticed BC Treasury Board directive issued last summer.
A Fraser Valley Current analysis of the newly released wage data shows that the average daily wage of a health authority director was about $1,464 per day of meetings in the last fiscal year, compared to $924 per day of meetings over the previous 12 months.
Directors who only attended a meeting or two a month were the best compensated. Thanks to pay increases instituted last summer, a board member attending just 15 days of meetings over the course of a year would be paid nearly $24,000. That per-day compensation is equivalent to that of a person making $400,000 a year. Some pocketed additional bonuses for chairing committee meetings.
Fraser Health’s Inderjeet Hundal, for instance, attended 12.5 days worth of meetings and, thanks to a top-up for chairing a committee, made $25,390. Interior Health's Spring Hawes also made around $25,000 and attended 12 days of meetings. (Meeting days may not capture the entirety of a director’s work. Board chair Jim Sinclair told The Current in 2021 that informal meetings and conversations aren’t covered by the board fees.)
The figures in this story all come from board compensation disclosures recently posted to each health authority’s website. You can see the wages and expenses for each director here:
2022/23: Vancouver Coastal | Fraser | Vancouver Island | Interior | Northern | Provincial Health Services
2023/24: Vancouver Coastal | Fraser | Vancouver Island | Interior | Northern | Provincial Health Services
Expenses also rise
BC’s health authority directors also recorded sharply higher expenses in 2023/24. Across the province, the expenses claimed by health authority board members rose by 27% compared to 12 months prior.
Every health authority saw expenses increase from the previous year, but no organization saw a sharper increase than Vancouver Coastal Health. In 2022/23, board members for that health authority filed for less than $3,000 in expenses. Only two members claimed expenses: Ballem claimed $2,702, and another director filed a claim for $51. In 2023/24, however, eight directors claimed a total of $12,683 in expenses, a 360% increase from the previous year.
The pay hikes combined with the increased expenses across the province to push cumulative remuneration for board members up from $1.3 million in 2022/23 to $2 million last year. The figures are a fraction of a fraction of the billions of dollars BC spends every year on health care. But the increased pay for those in charge of the province’s health care system comes as that system is increasingly unable to provide the basics to British Columbians.
A uniquely large pay hike
Board members, also known as directors, are hand-selected by the provincial government from local communities served by health authorities. Each board has between nine and 12 appointed directors. They include local doctors, health experts, businesspeople, Indigenous leaders, heads of non-profits, and political allies of the reigning party of the day. Most board members attend between 12 to 24 days worth of meetings each year.
The health boards and their directors are not involved in the day-to-day operation of the health authority. Instead, they provide oversight of a health authority’s operations and can lend their respective expertise and guidance to the organization’s staff. Fraser Health’s website says its board “provides the governance and vision for Fraser Health. It works with the senior executive team to establish overall direction, review long-term plans and ensure appropriate community consultation.”
Each board serves at the whim of the provincial government. Although they can offer some independent advice and oversight, they also are tasked with implementing the governing party’s health care priorities. For that reason, board members are often ideological allies of the governing power while chairs are frequently men and women who have served at the nexus of public service and politics. The current chairs of BC’s two largest regional health authorities ( are Jim Sinclair and Penny Ballem. Sinclair, at Fraser Health, is the former president of the BC Federation of Labour and a longtime NDP ally. Ballem, with Vancouver Coastal Health, is a doctor who previously served both as BC’s deputy health minister and as Vancouver’s city manager.
The raises come as a result of a treasury board directive signed last summer by Finance Minister Katrine Conroy.
You can see the 2024 treasury directive here. You can see the 2020 directive it replaced here.
Directors are paid a flat annual fee—called a retainer—plus fees for each meeting they attend. (Meetings that last less than four hours count as half days, while meetings that last more than four hours count as full days.)
Conroy’s directive gave members of so-called “level 5” boards—health authority boards and “large commercial crown corporations”—a 72.5% increase in their retainers. Their meeting fees jumped by 44%, from $500 a day to $720.
Directors of other provincial boards (there are six levels) received 15%-17% pay bumps.
Although each health authority sets its board’s pay according to the treasury directive, they don’t have to rigidly follow those guidelines. The treasury board directive states that “there is no requirement that appointees be paid, nor that they be paid at maximum rates.”
On Friday, The Current asked the province for an explanation of the pay increases for health authority boards by the end of day Monday. A response has not yet been received.
Fewer meetings
Although the total number of meeting-days worked by board members declined by 3% last year, members’ cumulative wages rose by 53%, according to The Current’s analysis of board compensation figures released this month by BC’s health authorities.
Board chairs like Sinclair and Ballem attend far more meetings, have more responsibility, and are paid considerably more than other directors. Members who chair committees are also paid an additional fee (as of last year, $5,000 to chair the audit committee or $3,000 to chair any other committee).
At Fraser Health, Sinclair’s pay rose 65%, from $37,750 to $62,585. Sinclair did work a little more for that money, attending 51 days worth of meetings, compared to 45.5 the previous year. The pay of BC’s six health authority’s chairs rose an average of 57% last year, slightly faster than the total board wage spending.
