{"id":1681,"date":"2011-02-28T09:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/?p=1681"},"modified":"2011-02-28T09:02:48","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T13:02:48","slug":"our-big-fat-bureaucracy-libin-tells-it-like-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/?p=1681","title":{"rendered":"Our big, fat bureaucracy (Libin tells it like it is)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a wonderful opinion piece by Kevin Libin in this Saturday\u2019s National Post<\/em> about the bulging Canadian bureaucracy and what it means for our country. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/span>The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Dan Henninger recently <\/em>put out an intriguing theory <\/em><\/span><\/a>to explain why Egypt was such an economic basket case \u2014 with unemployment and food inflation fuelling in large part the political instability there \u2014 while Turkey, another profoundly Islamic country, has seen its economy flourish. Look at the size of the public sector, he says: in Egypt, the percentage of people working for the government is 35%; in Turkey, it\u2019s 13%. There is, he points out, \u201ca striking correlation between economic success in emerging economies and relatively low populations of public employees, notably in Asia.\u201d The strong performers of Korea, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and China have small public sectors relative to their population, while moribund economies breed university grads for the state bureaucracies that provide some measure of job security, buying regimes some stability. \u201cPast some tipping point of a population employed by the state, an economy starts to choke,\u201d Henninger writes. With more than 20% of Canadians now working in our public sector, and rising, it\u2019s worth asking where, exactly, our own tipping point is.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This week, Statistics Canada released new numbers of public sector growth that showed that beginning in mid-2005, right before the Conservatives were elected, the growth in public sector jobs outpaced the growth of Canada\u2019s population, after four years of lagging below the general population growth rate. And starting in 2008, that rate really began to soar, and it hasn\u2019t stopped since. One of the biggest culprits in the last two years has undoubtedly been the Conservatives\u2019 stimulus plan, notes Jack Mintz, the economist and chair of the University of Calgary\u2019s School of Public Policy.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Those Stats Can numbers can be found here:<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.statcan.gc.ca\/daily-quotidien\/110222\/dq110222b-eng.htm<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read Kevin Libin\u2019s column in full here:<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.nationalpost.com\/opinion\/columnists\/bureaucracy\/4351326\/story.html<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There was a wonderful opinion piece by Kevin Libin in this Saturday\u2019s National Post about the bulging Canadian bureaucracy and what it means for our country. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Dan Henninger recently put out an intriguing theory to explain why Egypt was such an economic basket case \u2014 with unemployment and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[52,35,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}