Crack research

Sue Kelland-Dyer, having recently emerged from self-imposed radio silence, spoke out last night on Nightline with Linda Swain.

Once again, she demonstrated her incomparable research skills:

Ottawa, or the federal government, is simply an institution, it owns no resources other than what they’ve taken from us offshore. It’s not a body, I guess, if you want to call it that, we have provinces and together we’ve joined together for a federation, and we call it Canada.

OK, so much for SKD’s knowledge of both the constitution and fiscal federalism. (The offshore is what’s keeping the federal government afloat?)

But it gets better:

But all of the jobs relative to that federation, whadda we say, seventy percent are in Ontario and Quebec.

Er – no.

According to Public Service Agency statistics, the "National Capital Region", and Ontario and Quebec not otherwise accounted for as part of the NCR, have 64.6% of public service jobs in Canada. Newfoundland and Labrador, by the way, has 2.1%.

Statistics Canada figures for federal public-sector employment (a larger class than the federal public service) puts the Ontario and Quebec combined share of federal jobs even lower, at 62.0%. Newfoundland and Labrador accounts for 1.9%.

In other words, federal public-sector employment in Ontario and Quebec is therefore lower than those two provinces’ share of the national population.

And Newfoundland and Labrador’s is higher.

But of course these statistics do not mesh with the SKD and Newfoundland nationalist orthodoxy that NL is somehow short-changed in terms of federal government employment. She even goes so far as to say:

...when it comes to Crown corporations, we have none. Even PEI has one, we have none. So we don’t have the headquarters here in Newfoundland and Labrador for anything.

Marine Atlantic is a Crown corporation.

A federal Crown corporation.

It is headquartered at 10 Fort William Place, Suite 802, Baine Johnston Centre, St. John's, NL, A1C 1K4.

As part of her crack research, she being a superb researcher and all, SKD should swing by some time.