By request for hyeall

Tweep "hyeall" was interested in seeing the public sector* work-force as a share of overall employment.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Here are the figures, in stacked-bar graphic form, for the five-ish years up to April 2010. (Updated figures should be available in a few weeks):

Nearly 30% of working people in the province work directly for some level of government or other public entity.

Here is the raw job-count (in thousands), with the same colour scheme:

And here is the job picture with public-sector employment excluded. The "boom", resulting in "record employment", is not coming from organic growth in the private-sector economy:

Careful examination will reveal that the private-sector employment and self-employment job figures plateaued in 2006.

By 2007, and the Summer of Happies, when former Premier whassisname was boasting about all the "pigeons" at the arrivals area of Newfoundland International Airport, coming home to work in the booming economy, the private-sector employed and self-employed labour force was already beginning to weaken.

It continued to weaken through the rest of the decade, turning around only in early 2010. The turnaround, at least to the end of available data, had not seen the figures recover to pre-slump levels.


* Includes the entire public sector: provincial, federal, and local government.
Data source: Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 282-0011.