As Manitoba’s provincial budget gets closer, we have heard
repeatedly from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation the claim that Manitoba has a
“bloated” public sector. The claim has been based on a recently published piece
of propaganda from the Frontier Centre: “The Size and Cost of Manitoba’s PublicSector.”
The lead claim from this document is that Manitoba has a far
higher proportion of its jobs in the public sector than other provinces: “26%
of jobs in Manitoba are in the civilian public sector (all levels of
government). In the country as a whole, just 20% of jobs are in the civilian
public sector.”
That sounds like a big gap, doesn’t it?
However, if you look more closely at the data, you quickly
find that the “analysis” is not comparing apples to apples. To achieve the 26%
and 20% figures the report includes employment at crown corporations and other
government business enterprises. This has the effect of exaggerating public
sector employment for provinces that have more public ownership and less
privatization. For example, Manitoba’s public sector employment figure includes
all the staff at MPI, one of Manitoba’s larger employers, whereas (most)
provinces that have private auto insurance will have no public sector workers
for this service.
To get a fair, apples-to-apples comparison of public sector
employment rates, you need to look at public sector workers without including
workers at crown corporations. If you do that, you find that Manitoba has 20%
of its total employment in the civilian public sector, compared to 19% for
Canada as a whole (Statistics Canada, CANSIM Tables 183-0002 and 383-0009).
That’s not much of a gap. What’s bloated is
the claim that Manitoba’s public sector is too large.
