On centralization

St. John’s municipal by-election candidate Bernard Davis isn’t going to let the facts get in the way of his usual Townie Walternoel-esque anti-federal rants.

His campaign, at least as conducted on VOCM No Names Please each week, seems solely based around “developing” the city through more federal government jobs, claiming, “St. John’s in particular was hit hard by the shrinking of the jobs federally…”, that “we’ve reduced by 25% less, and the federal government nationally has only reduced by 5%”, and that the federal government is “centralizing everything in Ottawa”.

As for the first claim? St. John’s experienced less of a reduction in federal civil service presence during the program restraint period than Canada as a whole did. From its peak year to its nadir, the number of federal civil servants in St. John’s declined by 17%. Nationally, the comparable figure is 20%.

What’s more, the cutbacks started earlier, and continued later, in Canada as a whole, than in St. John’s. Peak federal government employment levels were in 1991 nationally, in 1993 in St. John’s. Federal employment bottomed out in St. John’s in 1998, and has been on a mostly upward trend ever since. Nationally, the bottom wasn’t reached until 1999.

Indexed to 1990, cutbacks in the country as a whole came sooner, cut deeper, and lasted longer, than they did in St. John’s.

The second claim is that “we” had our federal civil service presence reduced by 25%. That is not true of St. John’s, whose fedgov workforce, at worst, declined by 17%, and which has increased in the past decade or so (2006’s are the most recent figures available) by 9%. In 2006, at least, federal employment levels in St. John’s were down 2% from 1990 levels; nationally, they were down 3%.

The province as a whole, however, has seen a significant decrease in direct federal government employment, down 33% from peak to bottom, down 26% from 1990 levels. Given that St. John’s has seen its federal workforce hold fairly steady, even during the restraint period, this means that the federal government job losses have been outside St. John’s, not in the city and its suburbs. Extracting St. John’s, the rest of the province lost over half its federal workforce between 1991 and 2002. And the decline started earlier, and lasted later, than in St. John’s.

The net effect of all these changes is that St. John’s, which in 1990 had less than half the federal workforce in the province, now has over 60% and rising.

And so, Bernard Davis wants to justify increasing federal civil service jobs in St. John’s, by citing job losses that have occurred everywhere else in the province but St. John’s?

Who’s the real centralizer, Bernard?

Here are the raw federal employment figures for the St. John’s Census Metropolitan Area, the rural rest-of-province, the province as a whole, and Canada as a whole. Source: Statscan tables 183-0002 and 183-0003, using September data.

       SJ  Rural    NL     Can

1990 4,648 5,104  9,752  403,388
1991 4,894 5,293 10,187  408,747
1992 4,938 5,277 10,215  407,526
1993 4,993 5,107 10,100  398,070
1994 4,879 5,025  9,904  388,442
1995 4,598 4,638  9,236  361,556
1996 4,631 4,209  8,840  346,961
1997 4,232 3,445  7,677  334,074
1998 4,156 2,833  6,989  327,791
1999 4,208 2,602  6,810  327,363
2000 4,352 2,475  6,827  335,809
2001 4,347 2,603  6,950  349,212
2002 4,490 2,456  6,946  359,943
2003 4,408 2,438  6,846  365,545
2004 4,270 2,671  6,941  364,634
2005 4,519 2,805  7,324  380,708
2006 4,544 2,691  7,235  390,416