Doubts about Loyola Sullivan's ability to grasp the picture beyond moving around digits on a page grows with this release on the federal government presence in Newfoundland and Labrador. The release turned into this story on VOCM.
It's hard to know how Sullivan came up with the numbers he prints in the release. Then again, Sullivan has never been straight with people about his own budget numbers. He seems to be able to be in perpetual fiscal crisis despite having gobs of cash coming in from all quarters.
There are two points here:
First, Sullivan's numbers and percentages are wrong.
Second, and more importantly, Sullivan's interpretation, that this represents a massive loss to the local economy just doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny or his own previous statements.
Let's just forget, for the time being, that Sullivan is the guy who, shortly after he took up the finance job, was complaining about the disproportionately large number of public servants in the province.
At the end of Fiscal Year 2004, there were 7, 189 federal public servants in the province, compared to roughly the same number at the end of each fiscal year since 1998. Those figures were obtained by the Bond Papers from the Government of Canada.
Sullivan uses 1990 as the base year for his calculation, likely because that happens to be one of the periods in which federal employment peaked in every province. He claims that federal employment decreased by 39% in Newfoundland and Labrador compared to a national average of 18%. That's a 21% disparity.
Well, at the end of Fiscal Year 1990, there were 415, 414 federal employees across the country. At the end of the last fiscal year, there were 371, 257. That represents 44, 157 fewer positions or about 10.6%.
The total number of Canadians employed by the federal public service is 1.15% of the total population.
In this province, the numbers went from 10, 140 to 7, 189 - a drop of 2, 951 jobs or 29% in the same period.
Still, federal employees in Newfoundland and Labrador represent 1.36% of the population, a proportion higher than Ontario (1.22%) and Quebec (0.98%).
Sullivan also doesn't talk about the increases in federal presence in places like Goose Bay, nor does he talk about the likelihood that the St. John's taxation data centre will be increasing its staffing levels soon and handling work from across the country.
But here's an interesting thing. In Nova Scotia, the 23% drop in federal employees in that province represents a loss of 7, 240 positions. That's more than double the drop in this province in absolute numbers, even though the percentage change is smaller.
Beyond that though, Sullivan claims that those federal job losses totaled up to almost double the reported figure - he says the 2, 774 jobs lost added up to equal 5, 300 jobs. Unfortunately, Loyola doesn't explain why that might be so. Truth is, I doubt he can. Whoever cooked up these digits for Loyola appears to have used typical multipliers for spin-off jobs for the private sector and applied them to public sector jobs.
However, public sector jobs - like say the 16 people at the weather office in Gander - don't produce the same spinoffs in the service and supply sector as a comparable number of jobs in the oil industry, manufacturing or the fishery. That's because the work they do by itself doesn't generate added economic benefit.
Suck a few hundred jobs out of paper manufacturing in central Newfoundland and on the west coast of the island and you are going to get almost double the jobs losses in banking, insurance, office supplies and other support services.
Screw with the fishery needlessly and you'll shag the economy out of hundreds of millions of dollars of real economic activity that brings much-needed foreign exchange into an economy that depends heavily on trade. You'll also muck around with tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs.
Take a few people out of Gander or the small Public Service Commission office in St. John's and they won't have quite the same effect.
Overall, Sullivan's main argument - that the feds are steadily decreasing their presence in Newfoundland and Labrador - just doesn't add up. Federal job numbers in the province have hovered around the same level for the better part of a decade. The small changes seen recently like Gander, fall within the seasonal fluctuations there have been anyway from month to month.
Beyond that, Sullivan is simply talking through his hat when he argues this province has a right to a "fair share" of federal employees. The same cock-eyed approach led the Mulroney government to create something called the naval Presence in Quebec program. It was a cash fiasco, ripped apart by the auditor general.
No province has a "right" to a proportion of federal jobs. Federal public servants aren't booty. They aren't spoils. They aren't a form of Equalization. Canadians deserve to have their federal services delivered cheaply and effectively. We don't need to fatten the payroll so that we can have people running a navy section in Manitoba.
On a local level, Sullivan should recall the disastrous Tobin policy of relocating public servants to communities across the province. It was poorly conceived, poorly executed and an admission that Tobin had failed completely in his efforts to come up with a single new idea for developing the local economy. Saskatchewan fell into the same trap with equally harsh consequences for Saskatchewan taxpayers.
Sullivan's release shows a few things:
1. Loyola can't do basic math.
2. Loyola can't see the big picture.
3. Loyola and the government of which he is a part are wedded forever to hand-outs from Ottawa - The January Deal (a massive Equalization transfer) and now federal jobs.
Underneath it all, it would appear the provincial government is now in the position Brian Tobin was in after two years in office: totally lacking in a single new idea.
Whining about Ottawa is hardly a New Approach.