Boom, boom (VII)

The following chart shows the relative growth of the provincial public sector, in all ten provinces, as compared to the arbitrarily-chosen benchmark of January 2000.

In the past decade, the absolute numbers of people in NL who work in the provincial public sector — the provincial civil service, public health care, social service, and education system, and public post-secondary education institutions — has increased by 35%. Not only is that the largest increase, start to finish, of any of the ten provinces, for most of the decade, NL has topped the chart in terms of the growth rate. And, starting in 2006, that growth curve spiked steeply upwards, with annualized growth of up to seven percent per year, unmatched by any other province except, starting in the second half of 2008, Prince Edward Island.

The chart is derived from statistics in StatsCan Tables 183-0002 (government employment). The figure for any particular month is the rolling average of provincial public-sector employment during the preceding twelve months inclusive, divided by the comparable figure for January 2000, and reduced to a percentage change.