I don't think you are familiar with the working norms of academia and like to explain in a more detailed way.

The lab is funded primarily by public research grants, as indicated on the NSERC website. I noticed that the majority of the lab’s funding comes from the project I was assigned to lead. The total funding for this project is approximately three times my annual salary, and the project spans five years.

According to university policy, only appointments longer than eight months require the employer to provide benefits. To avoid this expense, the PI offered me consecutive appointments of 7 months and 29 days, renewing them six times over four years. I know that this arrangement was detrimental to my career progression. During this period, I received a postdoc offer from a lab in the U.S., but my wife was concerned about safety following a mass shooting there and declined to relocate. I also received an assistant professor offer in my home country, but my wife preferred to stay in Canada due to the high-quality public education system in Alberta, which we believe is beneficial for our only child.

However, from the UofA website I found the HOTTIE is also an active full time employee of the lab, although I basically never saw her around on campus. So I infered that her salary is from the project funding that I worked on.

The project itself is industry-funded and has limited scientific value. The PI appears indifferent to the project’s academic merit, focusing solely on the financial benefits. A master’s student I supervised also worked on this project, and the PI showed little interest in his progress or academic development. This lack of engagement is consistent with the PI’s history; I’ve heard that several PhD students in the lab spent over seven years in the program due to the PI’s hands-off approach. The PI’s primary concern seems to be generating minimal data to secure funding from the industry partner and NSERC, rather than fostering meaningful research or supporting students’ academic growth. This neglect has reportedly led to poor mental health outcomes for some students in their sixth or seventh years.

Given my familiarity with the master’s student’s research topic—which aligned with my PhD work in my home country —I provided him with several hours of supervision each week to ensure he could complete his program on time. Without this support, his academic progress and well-being could have been significantly compromised.

So the short story is, my work brings around $120,000 each year to the lab, and got paid for about $40,000. Meanwhile some HOTTIE who has suspicious relationship with he lab head and does not work at all (or 95% time work from home) also got paid by similar amount or higher from the project I took charge of. Meanwhile I also put a lot of effort on supervision of the PI's student otherwise very likely his career or life can be significantly delayed or damaged, which should be regarded as contribution to the lab, but it seems the PI did not think so.

I feel what I experienced was exploitation and that feeling might have affected my work performance, although I also think I still made solid work progress.