There are two economies in Canada right now. In one, employment rebounded smartly after the pandemic maelstrom in the spring of 2020, recovering lost jobs by September of that year. In the other, it took until November, 2021 to rebound.
In one, the number of jobs has jumped by 18 per cent between February, 2020, and last month. In the other, the number of employees has risen by a third of that amount, just 6 per cent.
That first economy is the public sector; the second is the one that has to pay for the rapid expansion of the first – the private sector. The most recent data from the Labour Force Survey from Statistics Canada underscore the outsized growth in the number of public sector employees, particularly since the onset of the pandemic.
Will this ever happen or will it become yet another perennial unfulfilled wish of Canadian conservative politics like defunding the CBC or right-sizing immigration?
