Fractured Fairy Tales: Jerry Earle edition #nlpoli

Via VOCM,  the reaction of NAPE boss Jerry Earle to a study that showed the provincial government is overloaded with provincial public servants compared to the situation in other provinces:

Earle says while that might be true, there are good reasons, given the province's geography and demographics. 

He says even comparing Newfoundland and Labrador to the rest of Atlantic Canada is not comparing "apples to apples."

 Okay.

Jerry is actually right.  And wrong.

Updated NL Public Service Numbers, 2003-2016 #nlpoli

A couple of access to information requests  - pdf 1  and pdf 2 - gave the world some new numbers on the growth in the core provincial public service from 2003 onward.

Here are the grand totals in a nice chart.  Each year is the total as of 31 December for that year.  The 2016 number is the figure on July 4.  The figures give changes in each department, excluding health care employees, the school boards and Crown agencies, boards, and corporations.  We'll look at the departmental figures in another post.  The Telegram's James McLeod apparently made the request wrote about someone else's access to information request,  just as your humble e-scribbler is doing, but it looks like he drew some erroneous conclusions in tracking the growth of specific parts of the public service.

The Big Picture numbers are useful, though.
There were 6851 public servants at the end of 2003.  That dropped to 6715 the following year and in 2006, the Conservatives started to hire.

They peaked in 2011 with 8952 public servants.  That's 33% larger from seven years earlier, in 2004.

Since then the public service has declined by slightly less than 1,000 positions, which is about a 10% reduction.

Sharp-eyed readers will note the differences in the figures supplied in a different access to information request in June.

The differences are small but they illustrate the difficulties you can run into some times.

-srbp-

The 2013 Q1 Churn Appointments #nlpoli

One of the great things about having orders in council readily available is that people can find information.

That’s exactly why the current administration has kept them as secret as possible since 2003 and continue to censor them, even though orders in council are entirely public documents.

But at least in the wake of the Bill 29 Freedom From Information measures,  the Conservatives seem to have been shamed into opening the vault on their secrets a bit even if they still censor public documents.

One of the things we can now readily see, though,  is the number of appointments made by cabinet in the first quarter of 2013 to deputy minister and assistant deputy minister jobs.

38! #nlpoli

This will be a record year fort changes in the senior ranks of the provincial public service.

On Friday, Premier Kathy Dunderdale announced change number 38 for 2012.  That puts her one off last year’s record total.

And as we told you a couple of weeks ago, she’s on track for 49 changes this year.

Cabinet ministers must be pissed off about this constant disruption in their departments.

-srbp-

The Swirl Continues #nlpoli

As it appears, all the talk last week in the Telegram editorial about the unusually large churn in the senior ranks of the provincial public service caused a bit of a churn in the stomachs of some people around St. John’s.

Some of them – including one curious series of Twitter comments – insisted the whole thing could be put down easily to retirements because we have an aging work force.  That’s an old one that local Tories have used to try to explain this away when SRBP raised it before.  We’ll get to that in a little bit.

For starters, let’s bring everything up to date. The more you dig, the more curious things you find.

As the Public Service World Churns #nlpoli

The Telegram editorial on Wednesday noted the most recent changes to the senior executive at the natural resources department and put it in the wider context of changes during the past 20 months.  The editorial notes that in the budget document for 2011 called Departmental Salary Details show that

the province had 20 deputy ministers, four associate deputy ministers and 61 assistant deputy ministers — a total of 85 positions at the top of the provincial civil service.

In the last 20 months, Dunderdale has announced 54 appointments at the level of assistant deputy minister or higher.

To paraphrase the editorial, maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t matter that their figures show a 63% turnover in senior provincial public service management.

If you look at the period since Kathy Dunderdale became premier you will see that the Telegram missed a fair bit. If you drill deeper again and look at the pattern of changes, you can see even more.

Disappeared Deputy? #nlpoli

Last summer, the provincial government proudly announced the appointment of a new deputy minister of natural resources.

The release included Diana Dalton’s biography.  She’s a lawyer who graduated from Dalhousie in 1979:

… Throughout the course of her career, Ms. Dalton has worked with the Governments of Nova Scotia and Papua New Guinea, as well as with the Department of Economic and Social Development, United Nations, New York. As an independent consultant she has worked in over 30 developed and developing countries in the areas of natural resources, energy and environment, including clients such as the World Bank, United Nations, national governments and private companies. Ms. Dalton has served for the past six years as Chair of the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board, and for two of these years she was also acting CEO.

As impressive as those credentials are, is Dalton still in the same job a year later?

Seems like more churning in the upper ranks of the public service.