Scrutinizing Alberta's Public Sector

The MacKinnon report argues that both the size and compensation of Alberta’s public sector are higher than comparator provinces, and the panel’s report suggests that the government could reduce the size of the public sector (through employee attrition), consider alternative delivery of government programs and services (through the private and non-for- profit sectors), and recommends “that the gove [...] This report uses data from the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to assess the size of the public sector in Alberta and its compensation compared to the private sector in Alberta and comparable definitions of the sectors in Canada as a whole and the three largest provinces: Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. [...] Overall, the size of the public sector in Alberta is still at or below the national average, even over the past four to five years, when the size of the public sector in Alberta grew and private sector employment declined. [...] Jur isdic t ions In what follows, we will continue to use data from the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH), as in the previous two figures, and complement this with data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to access the size of the public sector in Alberta and its compensation compared to the private sector in Alberta and comparable definitions of the sectors in Canada as a whole and t [...] The lower panel of Table 1 shows the both the SEPH and the LFS are similar in terms of the number of employees in each of the industries.