Private to Lynn Hammond

For the benefit of Lynn Hammond, here's a chart showing the relative change in the size of the provincial public sector (sum of direct civil service, health care system, and education system employment; crown corporations not included), and change in the provincial population, 2002-2014.

Figures are an annualized 12-month (employment) or 4-quarter (population) average, indexed to 2002 = 100.

 

Not only did the rapid rate of growth in the provincial public sector under the "Conservative" government outstrip a very modest rebound in population, it actually preceded it.

About that population strategy

The latest shuffling of the deck chairs takes Ross Reid out of his full(ish) time responsibility for Our Dear Population Strategy and into the Premier's office, a move which the Premier says won't hurt Our Dear Focus on Strategic Population. The CBC reports:

Dunderdale says Reid will continue to head the program, in addition to his new job as her chief of staff. 

"The strategy continues — we'll move it into executive council. Population growth is extremely important to us," the premier said. 

The strategy is designed to figure out a way to reverse the declining population of the province and bring more young families in. 

"We're finally seeing numbers move in a positive direction, but we have a long way to go. And if we're going to prosper as a province, our birth rate has to go up, we have to do more immigration," Dunderdale said.

It's unclear which numbers are moving in a "positive direction". In terms of natural demography — births and deaths — Newfoundland and Labrador is on the edge of a demographic precipice, with the rate of deaths about to start exceeding the replacement value of births.

This chart shows the birth and death numbers as the trailing sum of the preceding four quarters over the past decade or so, up to and including the first quarter of 2013. (Annualizing the data this way serves to smooth out the significant seasonality in birth and death figures, which would otherwise mask the longer-term trends.)

The eagle-eyed may note the uptick in the number of births starting in 2007 or 2008, and think "aha! Progressive Conservative Family Growth Benefit!"

Not so fast, pronatalists: the uptick actually began before the DannyDollars program rolled out, and both the uptick, and the subsequent plateau and decline in births, are consistent with Atlantic-wide demographic trends. This chart shows the comparative change in the number of births for the three largest Atlantic provinces, indexed to 2004 values. The trends in all three provinces follow similar lines and are nearly synchronous:

On the interprovincial migration front, outmigration has fallen in the past year, which might be a positive demographic and economic indicator. However, there is little sign of an increase in interprovincial in-migration, which is unusual behavior for an economy that is supposedly booming and suffering a labour shortage. In-migration rates were higher in 2008-2009, which is a typical pattern for Newfoundland and Labrador whenever there is, as there then was, a North American recession. (As above, this chart shows four-quarter rolling sums, not individual quarterly figures.)

 

The curious lack of evidence of economic and demographic attraction is also borne out in the international immigration figures. Not only does international immigration (including returning emigrants) show little sign of the increase that  you'd expect of a booming economy, lousy with "world-class" energy megaprojects, the most recent figures show a noticeable down-tick. The annual sum for the most recent quarter is the lowest in three years. (The raw quarterly immigration figure for 2013 Q1 is the lowest in a decade.)

 

 

 

 

This is what a boom looks like

Again courtesy of our old friend CANSIM Table 282-0011, here is a chart comparing the rate of employment growth in the public and private sectors in Newfoundland and Labrador since the "conservative" spending spree began in 2006.

The figures represent the cumulative growth in public-sector employment, and the private-sector labour force (employment and self-employment), expressed as a percentage change from July 2006 — when the "Conservatives'" early experiment with restraint came to an end — up to May 2013. To smooth out seasonal variations, figures are calculated using twelve-month trailing averages.

Since bottoming out in July 2006, public-sector employment in Newfoundland and Labrador has grown by 25.8% Over the same period, the private-sector employed labour force — private employment and self-employment combined — has grown by just 3.4%, rising only modestly since the depths of the 2008-09 recession.

No other province has seen such a large increase in its public sector over that same period, though PEI is effectively tied at 25.7%. The only other province to see an increase remotely as large is BC, at 20%. The other two Atlantic provinces have had public-sector growth rates under 5%.

On the private-sector side, only Nova Scotia (2.7%) and PEI (2.1%) have had smaller growth rates, while New Brunswick, alone, among the provinces, and worryingly so, has seen its private-sector employment decrease by more than 1%.

Since July 2006, the net increase in public-sector employment in Newfoundland and Labrador was 14,300, compared to a net increase in private-sector employment and self-employment of 5,300. No, your eyes do not deceive you — the public sector accounts for almost three quarters of the increased employment during this time of "boom". Canada-wide, the public sector accounts for 36% of net employment gains since July 2006, with only PEI's public sector outstripping NL's, at 80% of net new jobs. (New Brunswick, as indicated above, has seen a decline in private-sector employment.)

This is what restraint looks like

After a very brief flirtation with fiscal restraint early in their time in office, the Newfoundland and Labrador Progressive "Conservatives" began a ramp-up in public-sector spending, including public-sector hiring, which shows no real sign of abating.

By way of Statscan CANSIM Table 282-0011, here is a chart of total public-sector employment in the province over the past decade and a bit. Of necessity, this includes federal and municipal public-sector employment, as Statistics Canada has discontinued detailed breakdowns by order of government and crown corporations. However, historically, the provincial public sector (civil service, health care, education, provincial crown corporations) accounts for most of the total.

Figures are in thousands. The raw monthly figures are shown as a pale dotted line, with the twelve-month running average shown as a heavier, solid line.

No, your eyes do not decive you: even up to this spring, the public-sector employed labour force was continuing to grow, with a twelve-month average of 70,000, nearly 15,000 more than when the "conservative" spending spree began in 2006.

In November 2012, the one-month total hit 73,100. And no, your eyes still do not decieve you, that is almost 20,000 more than the monthly low of 53,400 reached in April 2005.

Soaked

John Gushue of the CBC expounds at length on Newfoundland's new-found prosperity:

The number of employed people — another key indicator of prosperity — has been steadily climbing through the years, and as of Friday's estimate stands at just over 234,000. Employers, basically, are competing among a pool that is much smaller than it was before.

In announcing the layoffs in March, the government claimed that that very vibrancy in the private sector would be strong enough to mop up a lot the job losses it was announcing.

Etc.

Unfortunately, in an otherwise interesting and informative piece, he fails to address perhaps the most important point about all the prosperity that everyone's soaking in.

It is driven by public-sector spending.

Yes, there's that offshore oil industry. But, since the end of major construction, and the move into production, employment in that industry is quite modest. The real economic impact has been in government revenues from oil (and Voisey's Bay), which the current, notionally conservative government have cashed out in the form of more hires in the civil service, other components of the public sector (health, schools, post-secondary education, crown corporations), and higher wages for those new and old hires alike.

Total public-sector employment in the province (including provincial, municipal, and federal employment) was about 60,000 in the last few years of the Tobin and Grimes governments. There was a slight decline in the early Williams years, down to just under 56,000, after which the provincial government went on a hiring spree that, to the end of the latest fiscal year, had not abated. In fact, in the past year, total public-sector employment has increased... again.

As a share of total employment (including self-employment), the public-sector workforce has always been highest in Newfoundland and Labrador, as among the ten provinces. The Williams government's brief flirtation with austerity, coupled with some growth in private-sector employment and self-employment, helped drive that share down from 29% in the late Grimes era to 26% in 2006. By the time the "conservative" Williams left office in late 2011, public-sector employment was back up over 30% of the employed workforce. Most of that was driven by components of the public sector which rise and fall with provincial government policy and budgetary decisions.

The public-sector employment growth rate has also outstripped that of private-sector and self-employment during most of the "conservative" era. Since January 2004, private-sector employment has grown by just under 10%, indexed to its January 2004 levels. Public-sector employment has grown by 16%, with even higher growth rates (note the slopes in the growth line) since the end of Williams' brief flirtation with austerity in 2006. Self-employment is way down, and despite recent growth, is still smaller now than it was a decade ago.

These figures are not consistent with a prosperity driven by industry, commerce, and a naturally growing economy. They are consistent with one thing only, the thing that some of us have been cassandra-ing about for years, only to be shouted down, or worse: the "prosperity" is an economic potemkin village, driven by massive public spending, spending that even Williams and his contemporaries, three, four, five years ago, were already calling unsustainable.

And that's what they called it, behind closed doors, for years, even as they made decisions to ramp that unsustainable spending up even more.

There is no distinction, not dichotomy, between the "prosperity" that everyone is soaking in, and the sudden, panicked decisions to slam on the brakes, bring spending under some semblance of control, and making hard decisions to start cutting.

There is no distinction, because the potemkin prosperity and the wave of cuts are two sides of the same economic coin.   [Charts adapt data from Statistics Canada table 282-0011, 12-month rolling averages]

Dunderdale Effect

Hey, look: the quarterly demographic estimates are out.

During the first quarter of 2012, interprovincial net outmigration from Newfoundland and Labrador was -1579. That is, nearly 1600 more people left the province for other parts of Canada, than moved in. That's the largest net outmigration since the same quarter in 2007, which was about the time #FormerPremier was boasting about all the people he'd meet at the only airport in Newfoundland, moving home for something or another.

The absolute out-migration figure (gross, not net) is even more striking: 4120 people moved away in the first three months of the year. That was the largest absolute quarterly out-migration since 1998 — which coincided with the end of the TAGS program.

Any second now, the same Tories and gullible media types who believed so fervently in a "Williams Effect", will naturally ascribe these demographic trends, personally, to the current First Minister.

Right?

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.

Someone get Doc Keefe a math

St. John’s Mayor Dennis O’Keefe, like any good Townie Tory Newfoundland Nationalist, has never let the facts get in the way of a good myth, and isn’t about to start doing so now.

He tells the CBC’s Ramona Dearing, in the top-of-Crosstalk banter:

There’s no doubt in my mind that over the years we have never, ever been treated fairly when it comes to federal employment in this province. I was told recently that on a per-capita basis we are number last when it comes to federal employment in Canada.

FOR. THE. UMP. TEENTH. TIME:

In 2011, the federal public service presence in Newfoundland and Labrador averaged 7442. (Averaged, because it fluctuates from month to month.) The total provincial population in the July estimate was 510,578. The per-capita federal civil service presence – you can repeat the basic arithmetic at home – works out to 1.5%.

Only Nova Scotia (2.6%), PEI (2.57%) and New Brunswick (2.2%) had higher per-capita federal employment. Newfoundland and Labrador is not only NOT “number last” in this regard, the province has a larger per-capita federal civil service presence than Ontario or Quebec or any other province that isn’t a capital-M Maritime one.

Moreover, the metropolitan St. John’s area, with about 38% of the provincial population, was home to over 5000 of those federal civil servants when Statscan measured civil service presence by metropolitan area in September 2011. That works out to 2/3 of the total federal employees in the province. (St. John’s also has at least 70% of the direct provincial government civil service work-force, in case any mayors who aren’t named Dennis O’Keefe are counting.)

Among its urban peers, the St. John’s metro area has a per-capita federal civil service presence of 2.6%, which places it fifth among the 33 Census Metropolitan Areas in the country. Only Ottawa-Gatineau (10.8%), Halifax (4.3%), Kingston (4.3%), and Victoria (2.9%) have a larger per-capita federal civil service presence than St. John’s.

Data sources: Statistics Canada CANSIM Tables 183-0002, 183-0003 (government employment); 051-0001 (provincial population), 051-0046 (population of Census Metropolitan Areas.)

Unrestrained

Via Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 183-0002, an update on the size of the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial public sector to the end of 2011. (Axes do not cross at zero.)

Each column represents the 12-month rolling average of the total provincial public-sector employment for the year up to, and including, that month. So, for example, the rightmost column, December 2011, shows the average provincial public payroll for all of calendar year 2011.

"Provincial public sector" as used about these parts includes the direct provincial government civil service, employment in the public health-care system, school boards, public post-secondary educational system, and crown corporations; all areas where provincial government budgetary and policy decisions shape the size and role of that component of public-sector employment. It does not include federal civil service and crown corporation employment, or employment by local governments.

Note that by late 2011, the 12-month average of provincial public-sector employment was actually reaching new highs, topping out just a nudge under 55,000 for the calendar year. The raw figure for December was 56,689 — the highest on record since Statistics Canada started keeping track in 1981. This was the product of slightly contradictory trends: direct civil service employment was down about 2% in 2011 vs. 2010, but employment rose in every other provincial public sector category over the same period. School board employment was up 0.2%, post-secondary education up 1.1%, crown corporations up 0.9%, and health care up 1.4%.

Provincial public-sector employment now accounts for almost a quarter — 24.4% for the twelve months ending in December 2011 inclusive — of total employment in Newfoundland and Labrador. Thanks to a modest uptick in private-sector employment over the course of the year, that is down slightly from the high of 25.3% of employment in early 2010, but is still near record high levels for the province, and well above the comparable figure for any other province, ever.

This is what constitutes "restraint".

Census - Initial observation

Between 2006 and 2011, the census population of Newfoundland and Labrador increased by 9,067.

The population of the St. John's metro area increased by 15,853, offsetting a population decline in the rest of the province of 6,786.

In totally unrelated news, since the 2006 census of population was carried out, the provincial government direct civil service, provincial health boards, provincial school boards, the post-secondary educational institutions, and provincial crown corporations have added about 8,200 people to the public payroll.

[Source: CANSIM table 183-0002, 12-month trailing average]

Three guesses as to where most of that hiring binge has physically taken place.

Hello, chickens, welcome to the roost

An amusing report from the Ceeb, just before Christmas came along and ruined everything:

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Kathy Dunderdale is warning civil servants to temper their hopes for a hefty raise once their contracts expire.

...

"I think they have to expect a more modest increase," Dunderdale told CBC News in a year-end interview to be broadcast later this week on On Point with David Cochrane.

"Our spending at the rate that we've been doing over the last eight years — and it has been very necessary for a number of very good reasons to do that — is not sustainable in the long run," Dunderdale said.

Herewith, a chart showing the growth in the provincial public-sector payroll over the past decade and a bit. (Figures are monthly rolling twelve-month trailing totals, in order to smooth out seasonality.)

The increase, especially since 2006, is a product of both the public-sector pay raises in recent collective agreements, and the sheer increase in the provincial public sector during the NDP Progressive Conservative Williams Government years.

By late 2010, the provincial public sector accounted for fully 25% of all jobs in the province — a share unprecedented not only in Newfoundland and Labrador's recorded economic history, but in the history of any province.

It's nice to see that the "Conservatives", having spent billions buying public-sector labour peace, and quarterly popularity reports for Eternal Premier, have finally discovered fiscal sustainability.

And good luck to them as they sell their message of sustainabily to a public, a labour market, and an electorate, where, thanks to their own differently-sustainable policy choices, one in four people is directly, or nearly-directly, on the provincial government payroll.

Comparative government (II)

A few days ago, this corner posed a question, asking you to identify the provincial governments in this chart, which shows the growth rate of the provincial public sector in various provinces, under various party stripes, over the past thirty years:

Here's the answer key:

Left to right, they are NL PCs (2003-present), NS NDP (2009-present), ON NDP (1990-1995), MB NDP (1981-1988), MB NDP (1999-present), BC NDP (1991-2001), NB PC (1999-2006), QC PQ (1994-2003), ON PC (1995-2003), ON Lib (2003-present) and AB PC (1992-present).

The growth rate of the provincial public service in Newfoundland and Labrador between 2007 and 2011 (13.3%) is unmatched over an identical time period by any of the governments in this sample except for the late years of the Landry PQ government in Quebec (peaking at 16%), the Stelmach PC government in Alberta (14.3%) , and late in the first term of the Gary Doer NDP government in Manitoba (14%).

More specifically — hi, Mark Whiffen, how you doin'? — the Progressive "Conservatives" under Danny Williams, during his second term, inflated the public sector at a rate comparable to, or faster than, every single NDP government that has been in office in any province since Statistics Canada started keeping track.

The only exception is Nova Scotia, where the Dippers haven't been in office long enough to make an apples:apples comparison, but where so far, they have also had a better record of getting provincial expenditures under control.

So, can anyone figure out why it is that anyone who is a fiscal conservative would ever support the Conservative-in-name-only Dunderdale2011s?

John Noseworthy? Mark Whiffen?

Anyone?

Comparative government (I)

This is a fun game you can play at home, school, or office!

Each of the sub-charts on this graph represents a provincial government of one particular partisan stripe or another. The pretty coloured blobs show the relative change in the size of the provincial public service over time, starting with the quarter in that government first came into office.

("Provincial public service" is defined here as the sum of all provincial civil servants, teachers and other school board employees, and employeees of the public health-care system, provincial public post-secondary education institutions, and provincial crown corporations. Data for all charts is from Statscan Table 183-0002.)

Since the values for each government are indexed to the conditions when they took office, each government's chart starts at 100% (the thick black line). From there, over time, some governments have cut, dropping the value to less than 100% of the initial value, while others grew the public sector, resulting in values rising above 100%. For instance, one government ended up growing the public sector by 20%, while another cut it by 15% before expanding again.

There is at least one government from each of nine provinces (though one province is not portrayed at all). There are several Progressive Conservative and NDP governments, at least one Liberal government, and one Parti Québécois government portrayed. All of the data is from January 1982 at the earliest. The most recent data is from the first quarter of 2011. There is at least one government still in power portrayed.

The colours of each chartlet do not necessarily reflect the partisan affiliation of the government whose data is shown. If the colour does so, it is entirely by coincidence. The left-to-right order does not necessarily reflect any geographical or chronological sequence, though each chartlet is internally chronological from left to right.

Just to make things really interesting, the time scale at the bottom, and the explanatory legend, have been redacted, ATIP-style. Do you dare attempt this most fiendish of statistical challenges?

Click to enlarge:

Population politics

Meanwhile, in Nova Scotia, the opposition provincial Progressive Conservatives are playing the same blame game once practiced by another notionally Progressive Conservative leader and party on the other side of the Cabot Strait. Once again, it's time to Blame the Government for the Demographics:

HALIFAX, NS – Progressive Conservative leader Jamie Baillie says the high cost, job killing polices of the NDP are to blame for the alarming amount of young people leaving Nova Scotia.

The latest Statistics Canada figures show approximately 60 per cent of Nova Scotians leaving for other provinces are in their 20s. Baillie says the province is on a path to a crisis situation with an aging population and a shrinking workforce.

“We’re losing our young people to provinces that see the importance of attracting business, investment and good jobs,” said Baillie. “On the other hand, the policies of our NDP government are raising costs, killing jobs and forcing our kids to leave to find work in alarming numbers.”

While immigration essentially balanced out the overall population number, Baillie says the loss of younger Nova Scotians adds to the province’s demographic woes. Nova Scotia has the highest proportion of people aged 65 and over in Canada and the lowest proportion of people under the age of 15.

“The NDP government’s high cost policies are suppressing job creation in Nova Scotia, leaving younger people with few opportunities,” added Baillie. “The real cost of the NDP’s mismanagement is families watching their children leave to start their lives elsewhere.”

Outmigration from Nova Scotia to other provinces reached 19,151 people in 2010/11 according to Statistics Canada preliminary data. That’s the highest number since 1989/90.

Now, let's accept — solely for argument's sake — that provincial government policies are what drives interprovincial migration patterns.

It was certainly the argument used by the Danny Williams Party from 2001 to 2010, blaming the then-governing Liberals for out-migration; then, when in government, pushing the notion, to the gullible, of some supposed "Williams Effect" to account for in-migration and other positive statistical indicators.

Curiously, according to this theory, the Liberal government did not get credit when out-migration slowed and converted to net in-migration; nor was the "Williams Effect" to blame when out-migration accelerated during the mid-2000s, nor when out-migration resumed in earnest once the worst of the 2008-2009 recession was over.

But, let us accept at face value the implied argument of the Progressive Conservatives on both sides of the Cabot Strait, that government policies drive interprovincial migration.

This naturally raises the question: what were things like when the PCs were in power in Nova Scotia?

Well, then.

This chart shows the quarterly out-migration from Nova Scotia going back just over thirty years, to 1980, cleverly colour-coded according to which political party formed the provincial government of the day:

Note the strong historical pattern for out-migration to peak in the third quarter of the year. This chart smooths out that seasonality; the figure for any given quarter here is the total outmigration for the previous year. (Note that the chronological attribution of party-in-power breaks down a little during transitional election years):

And remember, out-migration is only half the picture. There is also interprovincial in-migration to consider, which from time to time results in net interprovincial migration into Nova Scotia. (Along with international migration, births, and deaths, all of these components go into the top-line population figure for any given province.) This chart shows net interprovincial migration in Nova Scotia, again colour-coded by government of the day, with periods of net in-migration in dark colours, and net-outmigration in pale colours:


So, all in all, interprovincial migration in Nova Scotia under the New Democrats is, well, on the lower end of its long-standing historical range, but still not quite as bad as it was at its worst, in 2006, when Rodney MacDonald was the province's Progressive Conservative Premier.

So: are provincial population trends a product of provincial politics?

Jamie Baillie and company may want to consider their answer to that question very carefully.

Data source: Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 051-0017.

For David Campbell

Re this. Twelve-month trailing averages of total private-sector employment and self-employment in New Brunswick (1000s):
And in Canada as a whole:
Data source: Statistics Canada Table 282-0011.

Federal presents (III)

"Truthfully," says the blogger, "Ottawa might be the best place to start the cutting rather than in a province that already has a lower than average share of federal presence."

Herewith, a rank chart of federal employment by province, expressed as the total fedgov full-time equivalent workforce, divided by the total employed labour force:
Truthfully, Newfoundland and Labrador has a higher than average share of "federal presence", behind only three provinces, and well above the national average.

Data sources: Statistics Canada Tables 183-0002 (federal employment), 282-0001 (labour force). Data represents the average for the twelve months ending March 2011.

*Population and employment data for the three territories, and data for federal employment outside Canada, are excluded from calculations.

Federal presents (II)

Herewith, a chart showing the federal civil service presence in major metropolitan areas across Canada, expressed as the total Full-Time Equivalent number of employees in September 2010, divided by the twelve-month average employed labour force in each metro area during that entire calendar year.

Other than the capital metro itself, St. John's has the highest rate of federal government employment of any "civilian" city. The other three of the top five, Kingston, Halifax, and Victoria, have larger federal employment presences due in large part to major military or corrections installations (or in Kingston's case, both.)

Metro areas not shown on this chart have federal civil service presences of less than 1% of total employment.

Date source: Statistics Canada Tables 183-0003 (federal employment), 282-0109 (employed labour-force population estimates for Census Metropolitan Areas).

Federal presents

For some mysterious reason, St. John's municipal politicans and pundits at large are usually among those on the front guard of the "federal presence!" rallying cry.

Never mind the fact that Newfoundland and Labrador has a higher share of the federal civil service than it does of the overall national population, or that the federal workforce in the province is the fourth-highest, adjusted for population, of any province.

By gum, St. John's is peeved about the whole federal presence issue, and not shy about expressing it.

But here's something for people in the rest of the province to bear in mind the next time a St. John's municipal politician jumps on the soapbox over this issue: St. John's is gaining federal jobs.

Yip. Gaining.

This chart shows the total federal workforce (total of full-time equivalents or FTEs) in greater St. John's, and in the rest of the province, for the month of September* in each year:
This chart shows the same information, but as a percentage of total federal government employment in the province:
In the early 1990s, the "federal presence" was heavily tilted towards non-metropolitan areas of the province. When program restraint, and the privatization of some previously direct civil-service operations, resulted in a reduction in federal employment totals in the first half of the 1990s, by far and away most of the jobs were cut (or transferred to the private sector) in places outside the northeast Avalon.

Since bottoming out in the mid-1990s, St. John's has seen a steady increase in "federal presence" of roughly 1000 FTEs, to the point where the federal workforce is now (in 2010) larger, in sheer numbers, than ever before on record. As a share of the total "federal presence" in the province, the St. John's metro area now has about 70% of total federal employment, as measured in full-time equivalents.

This also happens to be about the same proportion of the provincial civil service which is based in St. John's, Mount Pearl, and other metro municipalities. (And no, contrary to popular belief, the St. John's area is not where most of the provincial population lives.)

The federal workforce in St. John's constitutes 2.6% of the metro population, 4.7% of the labour force, and 5.1% of employment.

By any of these three measures, that makes St. John's the city the fifth-most dependent on federal government employment after Ottawa-Gatineau (obviously, 19.5% of employment), Kingston (8.9%, bolstered by RMC and federal prisons), Halifax (7.9%,bolstered by the navy and some regional offices), and Victoria (5.6%, also a navy town).


* Data sources: Statistics Canada Tables 183-0003 (for St. John's metro area) and Table 183-0002 (province as a whole). Table 183-0003 provides an annual count for each Census Metropolitan Area during the month of September. Table 183-0002 provides counts for every province for each month; the September data from this latter table is used here to provide an apples:apples comparison.

By request for hyeall (II)

It's July, that most wonderful time of the year... when Statistics Canada brings its free public data portal, CANSIM, up to date to June 2011.

This means a body can update now-outdated charts which he produced just scant weeks ago for your colour-enhanced enjoyment.

Once again, here is the stacked-bar portrayal of the provincial employed labour force, distinguishing three classes of working people: public-sector employees (which includes federal, provincial, and local government employees as well as crown corporation employees), private-sector employees, and the self-employed. As with previous charts of this type, the figure for any one month is actually the average of the previous twelve months inclusive. This smooths out seasonal variation which otherwise makes trends hard to spot.

Here is the same information, but as a stacked numerical total (in thousands of persons):
This is the picture with public-sector employees excluded. Only private-sector employees and the self-employed figures (again in thousands) are included.

It is noteworthy, and not a little troubling, that the private-sector labour force has not yet recovered to the pre-recession plateau (shown as a red line). It is also a potential worrying sign that growth in the private-sector employment force, after about a year of respectable gains compared to the 2008 recession, has levelled off.
And here is the numerical growth in the public-sector employment force all by its lonesome. Again, this is the sum of all public-sector employees, including employees of all levels of government and all crown corporations. In the five years since the recent-historic low, in early 2006, of about 55,600 public-sector employees, the public-sector labour force has increased by about 11,500 or over 20%. As a share of total employment, the public sector has grown from 26% to 30%.

The twelve-month average ending in June 2011 was 67,100 — an increase of 4100, or 6.5%, from the same period twelve months earlier. This represented an increase of over half a percentage point in the public sector's overall share of the employed labour force.

Data source: Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 282-0011

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.