“Look,” he said, shivering. “If you want a doctor in Norris Point, you pay her $250k. If you want a diesel mechanic to keep the ferry running in Blanc-Sablon, you pay him $160k. The SunshineListStats showed us that our biggest expense isn’t corruption. It’s the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the distance. It’s the rock.”
The year the stats went viral was 2026.
It began not with a scandal, but with a spreadsheet. A data journalist in St. John’s, a sharp-eyed woman named Maggie O’Rourke, had spent three weeks scrubbing the raw data from the Treasury Board. She wasn’t looking for fraud. She was looking for a story. She cross-referenced the names, job titles, and municipalities against census data, ocean temperature anomalies, and fish landings. sunshineliststats newfoundland labrador
Her comment on the disclosure form, which Maggie found in a PDF appendix: “The sun don’t shine here for three months. I earned this by remembering what light looks like.” “Look,” he said, shivering
The final entry on that year’s SunshineListStats analysis was a footnote. It referenced a lighthouse keeper on Belle Isle, a woman named Clara, who made exactly $100,003—just barely making the cut. The SunshineListStats showed us that our biggest expense