Special for @whiff83...

... and anyone else who somehow simultaneously imagines that they are fiscally conservative, yet support the NDP government of Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale.

This chart shows the three-year rolling average (to smooth out a bit of lumpiness and tease out the mid-term trends) of provincial public-sector employment as a share of all employment, in any given province, at any time since Statistics Canada started counting. "Provincial public-sector employment" includes the direct provincial civil service, the public secondary and post-secondary education system, the public health-care system, and provincial crown corporations.

For as long as Statistics Canada has been counting, Newfoundland and Labrador has always had the proportionately largest provincial public sector workforce. However, under the current "conservative" government, even that already-large public sector has grown to a size never before seen in any other province... not even the "socialist" NDP ones. By 2011, one in four people employed in the province was employed by the provincial government, a school board, a university or college, a health care board, or a provincial crown corporation.

And this, despite a "conservative" government which came to power pledging to decrease the size of the public-sector payroll through attrition. It's remarkable, what a couple of strikes — and a scary hit in the quarterly CRA poll — can do to change your deeply-rooted fiscally-conservative beliefs.