Ok, but it's still 2.7% a year

A whole lot better than the masses of funds -- hell, entire banks -- who collapsed into literally nothing by 2009.

The point is we shouldn't take anyone's advice on structuring financial administration at the university who has less than no clue about how the financial administration works or what it does. That is the case here, with your posts. I don't imagine there are many, if any, members of CUPE 3902 who are in a position to comment in an educated way about the nitty-gritty internals of UTAM.

It's about a disturbing trend in the past 15 years of Canadian university administration ballooning both in terms of numbers of administrators

You say 'balooning', others of us say 'necessary'. Your judgment of 'balooning' is backed by a complete misunderstanding of UTAM's mandate, mode of operation, and even performance record. So we shouldn't take it seriously.

We should also be questioning whether this trend will continue.

Sure. I judge that it will, and should, and others will too, because we understand the benefits administrators actually bring to an institution and how ridiculously underpaid they already are (in comparison to administrators of any other similarly-sized organization).

In any case, the salaries of administrators has absolutely no bearing on the salaries of TAs or contract instructors. There's no connection. It's a completely emotional argument. You are hoping to tug at the 'fat cat' strings on the hearts of the ignorant and rally support for your cause. That's fine. But there will always be people willing to shred your argument on a logical basis, and sometimes they might be vocal about it, not just posting on reddit.

Canadian universities are public institutions, and so should be treated as such, not like for-profit businesses

If UofT were treated like a for-profit business, you'd know it. Half of existing and funded graduate departments would have funding cut entirely, and the only students who would sign up would be those who could pay. Currently, UofT is if not the farthest thing possible from a for-profit business then the next least extreme, and you have no idea how good you have it.

I would expect administrator's salaries to be rising ONLY at the rate of inflation.

Which is why you don't determine anyone's salaries, much less the executives of a top-20 worldwide research institution.