BURST
A small-business advocacy group is taking the B.C. NDP to task for the ballooning size of the province’s public service since forming government in 2017, warning that the trend has stymied growth in the private sector.
Over the last eight years, 210,000 new employees joined the public sector, which includes not only government but also health care, education and Crown corporations, contributing to the province’s record deficit of over $9 billion, according to this week’s report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Data shows that while the public sector grew 36.1 per cent between 2017 and 2024, the private sector grew 9.7 per cent.
“Right now, we’re looking at tensions between public and private sector growth. We’re experiencing pressures on B.C.’s competitiveness, and what small businesses tell us is that they want the government to focus on economic growth and making the public sector more efficient,” said Ryan Mitton, CFIB’s B.C. director of legislative affairs.
“The data we’ve seen shows that B.C. has actually gone in the opposite direction.”
According to Mitton, the growth of the public sector has cost the government an extra $26.5 billion in compensation over the last eight years and public sector bargaining this year is only going to increase that figure.
He says every 1 per cent raise that government employees get would cost the government an extra $532 million, and a four per cent increase would wipe out all the savings earned through the cancellation of the carbon tax.
Part of the problem, according to the CFIB, is that the NDP has focused their hiring in management positions, which are more expensive and unintentionally make the system less efficient.
The health-care system has a manager for every 3.8 unionized employees, with a 52 per cent increase in management costs since 2017, totalling $1.2 billion.
Health authorities grew the most of any department within government between 2017 and 2024, adding 91,799 workers at a cost of $14.4 billion.
In terms of prescriptions, the CFIB recommended the province reject any proposals from the B.C. General Employees Union, B.C.’s largest public sector union, to raise taxes on land values, high-income earners and natural resources.
It also wants to see the province maintain the hiring freeze it implemented in December 2024 and examine employment growth of management positions within the civil service and those operating Crown corporations.
Finance Minister Brenda Bailey said in a statement the government will continue to hire front line workers, such as doctors, nurses and teachers, but will maintain the hiring freeze and ensure the civil service stays roughly the same size for each of the next three years.
“At the same time, we’re focused on fuelling economic growth. We are acting quickly to diversify our trading partners and protecting and creating jobs that will power our economy — and we know the revenue will follow,” she said.
Peter Milobar, B.C. Conservative finance critic, says the problem with government’s solutions — such as the hiring freeze — is that they don’t apply to political staffers. And many positions that government agencies, such as the Provincial Health Services Authority, have eliminated are vacancies that had yet to be filled.
“We keep calling it the ‘so-called’ hiring freeze, because the government has made it very clear that if it’s political staff, if it’s communication staff, those are exempt from any type of a hiring freeze, and they’ve been true to their word, sadly, in terms of continuing to hire more and more,” he said.
“We haven’t seen any ministers really take the reins and say, ‘OK, we’re going to actually build the private sector economy. Instead it’s been this relentless focus on growing public sector administrative management.”
The concerns are shared by the BCGEU, which represents over 95,000 members and incudes more than 34,000 that work for the civil service.
BCGEU president Paul Finch says the percentage of new managers hired by the government over the past few years has been roughly double the number of unionized workers hired.
“In our view, in terms of our front line workforce, we’re actually undersized, and one of the pain points is the incredible waste on spending on private contracts to deliver services that can be delivered more cheaply and efficiently by us,” said Finch.
At the same time, he disagrees with the CFIB report’s inferences that the government is spending too much on public service workers, saying his members actually make 2.7 per cent less than the provincial average and that B.C. remains one of the lowest tax jurisdictions in the country.
Finch said the report provides no comparisons between B.C. and other provinces or the federal government, nor does it work off a standardized five- or 10-year time period, but rather covers the time frame of the NDP government in order to better criticize it. To this end, he says there is no comparison to the previous B.C. Liberal government either.
“I didn’t get a lot out of their report because there’s not a lot to get out of it,” he concluded.