News article quoting AIMS President Marco Navarro-Génie
• Chronicle Herald, 23 November 2016
More needs to be done to trim the provincial public service, says the author of a new report.
The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies released a public policy study Tuesday about the scale and expense of provincial government employment in Atlantic Canada.
The Size and Cost of the Public Sector in Atlantic Canada, 2015 follows the methodology of an earlier AIMS paper from 2014, which investigated whether government employment in the region was indeed higher than the national average.
“There is simply more expected out of the government here,” said AIMS president Marco Navarro-Génie.
Co-authored by the institute’s policy analyst, Jackson Doughart, and Navarro-Génie, the study used most recently-available Statistics Canada data on labour and population to establish the per-capita size of public sectors in all Canadian provinces. The paper also examines the proportion of public sector workers in the labour force and the percentage of public sector compensation in overall compensation.
“The data we analyze in this paper demonstrate the problem of oversized public sectors, which is worsening in Atlantic Canada,” said Navarro-Génie.
“Reducing the size of the public service is a thorny political issue, but the provincial governments of these underperforming economies must consider bringing their employment and wage levels to reasonable limits, such that the many public service needs of the region can be performed affordably.”
Read the full article on the Chronicle Herald website.