A Job is a Job?
During the all-candidates forum held at the Cochrane Lions Event Centre on April 9, NDP candidate Steve Durrell was asked how many government jobs had been created.
Durrell replied that he didn’t know, but noted that, regardless of who creates it, a job is a job, and proceeded to praise the efforts of the NDP government in creating jobs. Well, I can help out poor Steve with that question.
During a period of a high rate of unemployment in Alberta (recent numbers of 7.3 per cent, with Calgary’s rate now being the highest among Canadian cities at 7.6 per cent, ahead of St. John's, Nfld. at 7.4 per cent, while Edmonton sits at 7 per cent), which was created by a loss of private sector (wealth creator) jobs.
Oon the other hand, since 2014 the public sector has added about 84,000 jobs (18%), while that portion of the private sector shrank by 7%. As a result, the government’s share of total employment is now around 23%, the highest in decades.
And such ‘job growth’ in the public sector is financed by annual deficits of over $10 billion such that the NDP government along the way has accumulated a massive debt (currently at $58 billion and forecast to hit $71 billion by 2019-2020), a debt to be inherited by young Albertans in the future!
According to such socialist, central-planning economics of growing the government and resulting formula for job creation, Alberta’s unemployment problem could be magically dispensed with. Simply, have everybody be employed by the government.
Ron Voss
