Government is outpacing the private sector when it comes to job creation, according to the Fraser Institute.
The public policy think-tank has often noted how Ottawa went on a hiring bender during and after the pandemic, and now Queen’s Park and municipal governments are catching up to the point of more than tripling the growth rate of the private sector.
A recently released Fraser study indicates that in eight of 10 provinces, except for Alberta and Nova Scotia, the rate of government job growth has been higher than the private sector.
The research shows Ontario’s net job creation, from 2019 to 2023, has been driven by growth in government employment rather than private sector growth, at 14.6 per cent and 4.8 per cent over the period, respectively.
“Across the country, Canada’s net job creation in recent years has been disproportionately driven by growth in government employment rather than growth in the private sector, and as of 2019, government employment as a share of total employment in the country is at its highest point since the mid-1990s,” said Ben Eisen, Fraser Institute's senior fellow and co-author of Economic Recovery in Canada before and after COVID: Job Growth in the Government and Private Sectors.
Historically, the study said, there is no recent era of recession and recovery in Canada that “has been so dominated by government sector job growth compared to private sector job growth, according to a Fraser news release.
Canada’s situation differs sharply from the U.S., where the private sector has generated a large majority of all new jobs in recent years and the rate of net job creation in the private sector has been nearly identical to that in the government sector.
