Governments have failed to streamline their costs
Canadian welfare state adds 175,000 new hires in five years
Well, it looks like Donald Savoie is back in the news, and for all the right reasons. Last week, in an opinion article published in the Business Edge by D'arcy Jenish, Savoie once again proudly touted his new anti-statist views, in that, he believes that the state has unequivocally failed, unlike the current private sector, in their use of new technologies and innovative strategies so as to curb their already Brobdingnagian operational costs.Savoie's concerns are real, especially since the numbers coming out of Statistics Canada clearly indicate an augmenting trend:
"the country's public sector, which includes, among others, federal, provincial and territorial governments, municipalities, schools, colleges, universities and hospitals, employed nearly 3.3 million people at the end of 2007. That's just over 10 per cent of the population and an increase of 175,000 in five years.The feds and the provinces combined accounted for a little over 33,000 of the new hires. The health and social services sectors grew by a whopping 48,517. Local school boards were up by 43,208, universities and colleges by 28,152 and municipalities by 27,519."
Furthermore, Savoie believes that the problem lies in the fact that governments have an extremely poor track record of keeping bad public policy on the books:
"The public sector has proven over the years that it is good at launching new programs and services. [...] It is not good at stopping them. Things just keep going even if they are not as useful as they originally were. It would be a stretch to say that this is good [government] management."Plus, as I've always said, "the business of government should not be the government of business." If these startling numbers say anything to us, it's that we need to start thinking long and hard about reducing the size of government both provincially and federally.
4 Comments:
WOW!! Are you his speech writer?
Nope. But it would have been an interesting contrast.
NBT,
If the degree of corporate success can be measured in executive salaries, they're doing more than fine.
Thanks in no small part to the land, water and freedom our bought-out politicians have handed over to them.
If you could see the state of affairs we'll be in in a few years when the corporate fascists succeed in destroying the few remaining social nets remaining for hard-working Canadians - I bet you'd change your tune.
The unions are gone, the marketplace is a fraudulent monopoly - from whence do you expect any benevolence to come?
Would you really trade maimed and handicapped Canadians for the Nation's fake fiat bottom line?
On the other hand - I doubt you'll find much public resistance to streamlining things like blackmailed boilers and secret private pension bailouts.
Best regards,
I think that we have far too many people earing on the public purse. Their unions sem to think that the public purse is never ending. Look at the mess Ontario is in. They have 45,000 people earning over 100,000 on the public purse an increase by 40,000 over the last ten years. That's why they are going broke. I am not sure but I know that New Brunswick is in the same boat. Far too many poeple earning over paid wages on the tax payers dime. The Toronto transit ticket collectors just inked a new deal that pays them 30/hour. I think that it is excess like this that will be our demise. And then the Mayor of Toronto has the guts to claim that Toronto is short changed by Queens park and Ottawa.
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