What do these people do to rate these salaries. Well, there are 18 Appendix A Mechanical Maintainers at OPG making up to $123,364. Hydro One has 16 Forestry Managers making up to $135,367 per year. OPG has 76 Civil Maintainers making up to $142,096.  Hydro One has two Barrie Inventory Specialists making over $100,000. I sorted the positions for Hydro One alphabetically and gave up counting at  Electical SubForeperson which was the 120th title, about 1/7th of the way though the whole list.

If you’d like to contact me at phil.froats@canadianbusiness.rogers.com, I’d be happy to send you copies of these salary details. The names have been removed and be prepared as these lists, like the Mississippi River, go on and on.

Almost 300,000 jobs were lost in manufacturing and construction alone.  The trade and transportation/warehousing sectors lost 72,400 and 30,800 positions respectively. Many of these were high paying positions. In June 2009, the average weekly wage was $823. The weekly wages for the major categories of job losses were: manufacturing $909; construction $1,066; wholesale trade $1,007; and transportation and warehousing $876. This makes for a lot fewer tax dollars to pay for more people in government.

 The suprise was the analyst consensus numbers. The mean analyst recommendation for both winners and losers tied at 4.1. The average recommendaton for winners was also 4.1, only 5% ahead of losers at 3.9.  Of the stocks which underperformed the TSX, 51% were given an analyst recommendation of over 4.0. A total of 59% of the outperformers had a consensus of over 4.0. So while theory says the outperformers should have better numbers, practice seems to say something very different.

If you would like a spreadsheet with the companies and their year-to-date returns and consensus numbers, please leave a comment on this blog or email me at phil.froats@canadianbusiness.rogers.com

You can still get the March  Investor 500 with about 20 data tables and lots of good investment advice on newsstands.

If you would like a bare bones version of the June 30, 2009 version, email me at phil.froats@canadianbusiness.rogers.com I’ll send you an excel table with 500 companies and their one and five-year share returns, market capitalization, revenue, dividend yield and industry.

In any ranking there are those that come first and those that come last. So we took the 25 elements in the list and grouped them into the categories of: walk/bike to work, housing, income, sales and income taxes, population growth, crime, health providers, unemployment, weather/pollution, transit and buzz. Next we picked which cites were at the top and bottom of each of these categories. In some categories there are multiple firsts and lasts. For population growth, all cities with negative growth were placed last. In transit, several cities placed first due to the robust usage of their transit systems. Taxes were done provincially, so all cities in New Brunswick placed last.

We found that if you get sick, do so in Grand Falls-Windsor, Nfld which has the higher proportion of health care providers to it’s population. Brooks, Alta. placed last here. If you are worried about crime, Petawawa, Ont. has the lowest overall crime rate and Thompson, Man. has the highest. The most affordable housing, based on house price and time to buy a house is in Bathurst, N.B. Canmore, Alta. and Burnaby B.C. tie for last.

If you want to see the entire list of firsts and lasts, email me at phil.froats@canadianbusiness.rogers.com. I’ll send you both firsts and lasts and a list of the ranking of all cities for 2009.

If you are interested in knowing the percentage differences for the 154 lines that cover all age groups and totals for Canada and the 10 provinces, drop me an email at phil.froats@canadianbusiness.rogers.com and I’ll be happy to send you the Excel spreadsheet.

In the meantime, the table below shows the overall average federal and provincial differences.

The table below shows 47 Ontario cities from the Moneysense magazine’s  Best Places to Live feature and applies the 2007 tax rate (the latest available) to the average house price as shown in the magazine to arrive at average property taxes for each community. It is sorted from highest to lowest total taxes. If want to move to a smaller community, taking the proceeds of your house sale to upgrade in your new location can result in a tax shock. The proceeds of $387,482 from the sale of an average Toronto house spent on a Peterborough dwelling would result in taxes of around $5,700 a year, about $2,400 more than you were paying. Getting out of Ottawa and spending the proceeds in Windsor would cost you a little over $2,500 a year in extra taxes.

Airports are big business. The authorities responsible for the five airports below had 2008 revenues totaling $2,286,911,000. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority alone posted almost $1,200,000,000 in revenue of which $447,062,000 was in landing fees. 

Along with the decline in traffic due to the economy, airports like Toronto and Vancouver which are close to the U.S. border face additional challenges. A search on www.expedia.ca shows that a round trip flight with one stop to Las Vegas costs $438 out of Toronto and $439 from Vancouver. If you take the flights out of Buffalo or Seattle, they cost $285 and $219 respectively. That means a savings of $306 to $440 per couple which goes a long way toward paying for an Elvis wedding.

The major shareholders of two of the companies recouped some of their losses. Frank Hasenfratz, who owned 15,216,800 shares of Linamar, made over $73 million on paper from the rise in share prices from Apr. 3 to May 27, 2009. However, from a high price of $26.10 per share on Oct. 2, 2007, he lost over $350 million to Apr. 3, 2009. Cascades major shareholders, Bernard, Laurent and Alain Lemaire, picked up over $75 million on their  30,109,250 shares in the 36 days ended May 27, 2009. Considering that between Jan. 19, 2007, and Apr. 3, 2009, they lost over $388 million, a little less than 20% of the red ink was drained out of their investment in Cascades.

Areva SA of France manufactures uranium and metallic fuels, constructs nuclear plants and generates and distributes electricity. Areva had a profit of $902 million on annual revenues of $20.6 billion. It’s stock lost 46% of its value over the last year.

Oesterreichische Elektrizitaetswirtschafts AG (Verbund), of Austria is the world’s largest publicly traded hydro company by revenue. It made $1.1 billion on last year’s revenues of $5.9 billion. It’s stock declined 35% in the past year.

Iberdrola Renovables SA of Spain blows in as the largest power from wind company. Last year’s revenues of $3.2 billion resulted in profits of $609 million and shares dropped 23% over the year.

First Solar Inc. in the United States, manufactures solar modules and generated $500 million in profit on $1.7 billion in sales making it the largest company involved in the solar energy industry. Shares fell 35% in the last year.

Energy Development Corp. of the Philippines generated $31 million of profit on $493 million in revenues derived from the production of geothermal energy. Stock dropped 32% during the year.

Fuel Cell Energy Inc. of the United States develops and commercializes fuel cell power plants. It lost $102 million on revenues of $115 million resulting in a 66% yearly drop in share price.

Canada’s largest green energy company by revenue is Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. The company lost $3 million on $81 million and stock fell by 50%.

• Lowest market cap up by  17% to $110 million.
• Average market cap now $2,569 million, a gain of $269 million.
• Total market cap increased by $135 billion which is greater than the GDP of 124 countries according to the IMF.
• Average one-year total share loss now 27.8%, an improvement from a loss of 32.8% at Apr. 3.
• Total of 64 companies with positive one-year returns, up from 51.
• Average total share return of 16.3% from Apr. 3 to May 11, 2009 for original Investor 500 companies.

Of the five companies with the best one-year returns in 2000, three are acquired or delisted and two still continue under different names but with less than $4 million in market capitalization. 

All of the companies below, representing over $191 million in market capitalization, are now gone off Canadian stock exchanges. 

Nortel Networks was by far the largest company with a market capitalization of over $229 billion. That was at a post-consolidated price of $788.50 per share, about 64% of the all-time high in July 2000. By Apr. 3, 2009, Nortel had dropped 99.97% of its 2000 Investor 500 worth to $0.25 per share. That’s a loss in value of $6,800 for every man, woman and child in the country.

The 2009 edition of the Investor 500 came out yesterday. It shows where money was lost and gained over the last year and gives some good advice on where the market might be headed. It’s worth a read.

• In loonies stacked equals the 2.5 times the distance from the earth to the moon.
• Equal to almost $62,000 for each Canadian family in the 2006 census.
• Only 23 countries had a GDP greater than C$550 million according to the IMF.
• At the Stats Canada average of $42,692, the annual wages of 12,884,000 Canadians.

In addition to the main rankings, we list stocks according to growth, value, turnaround, defensive, income trusts, best managed, cash flow, dividends and the top 25 stocks in several catgories.  If you read the magazine for the articles, Joe Castaldo, Jeff Sanford, Sarka Halas, Sharda Prashad, Andrew Wahl, Thomas Watson, Matthew McClearn and Calvin Leung all make very powerful contributions.

If you like hockey, you’ll like the marriage of statistics and salaries on this site. It will certainly make you want to ask for a raise. If you like baseball or golf, try the links shown here, we’ve married up salaries and statistics for these sports too.

Period Ending              October 08    March 09    # Change    % Change
Private Employees       11,101,300    10,806,500    (294,800)    (2.66)
Self Employed               2,649,500      2,649,800             300       0.01
Public Employees          3,464,900      3,381,800      (83,100)    (2.40)
Total employees           17,215,700    16,838,100    (377,600)    (2.19)

Within these numbers, job security was partially a function of your occupation. Construction and manufacturing were hardest hit with losses of 8.3% and 7.1% respectively. This represents about 243,000 people, approximately the population of Saskatoon. Other areas that saw percentage declines greater than average were:

Agriculture (2.5%)

Natural Resources (4.6%)

Transportation and Warehousing (3.3%)

Education Services (3.1%)

Public Administration (2.8%)

Some areas saw employment gains, with health care and social assistance and other services showing increases of 1.7% and 2.1% respectively.

In addition, to $1,250,000 for the above privatization-that-never-occurred payments, Michael Sabia, who left in July 2008, received $14,236,139 in compensation “triggered at the time of his departure from Bell Canada and BCE in 2008.” He also received $729,167 in salary and $3,125,000 in incentive compensation. In total his about one-half-of-a-year compensation was $20,953,285 or about $0.025 per share.