It's Not You - It's The Government

UPDATE: Government reporting boasts of growth and increase. So why to people feel worse off than they were two, five, ten years ago?

Call It Growth Without Prosperity

Nova Scotia is leading the nation in an historic decline in living standards.

Over and over the government, led by friendly and folksy talk from outgoing mayor Mike Savage coaxes, cajoles, and goads us into the Notion that everything is going great. We’ve been “world-class” for a while. Now they’re telling us we’re “Cool”.

If you are sensing something is just not right about this you are not alone. And you are not wrong.

It's not you. Something is wrong.

Like… Stepford Wife level wrong.

From April 2019 to the end of 2023, inflation-adjusted per-person GDP fell almost 3 percent, from $59,905 to $58,111.

We have the lowest GDP Per Capita in the Country

We have the Highest Government Expenditure Per Capita in Canada… and by extension the highest in the developed world.

Government spending in Nova Scotia equaled 63 per cent of the economy in 2022 (the latest year of available data), the largest of any province. The Canadian average was 41 per cent. If Nova Scotia were a country, it would exceed all countries on size of government except micro-states such as Kiribati (population of 130,000) and the Marshall Islands (population 42,000) and retro-communist states such as North Korea and Cuba.

Nova Scotia has high military spending, but if it were normalized to the Canadian average, government spending would remain about 60 per cent of the provincial economy.

If per-capita GDP does not recover in 2024, this period may be the longest and largest decline in per-person GDP over the last four decades. It could also leave us back behind where we were ten years ago. We’re already at least back to 2016 levels. That’s a lot of ground to lose from already being in last place.

Canada’s GDP per capita has been falling 0.4 percent a year since 2020, the worst rate among 50 developed economies. The job growth we have seen in Canada is primarily driven by the growth of government. According to the Public Service Commission of Canada, the size of the federal public service reached 367,772 employees in 2024—an increase of 43 percent since 2016 when the current government took office.

Canadian provinces also show significant disparities in economic output per person. Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary, observed the Maritimes lagged behind Mississippi.

The reason this is not the top news story is that government at all levels continues to report numbers in the way that's most convenient to them.

GDP is reported in total not per person. So the news headline is GDP growth is strong... not mentioning that population growth is much higher and therefore every individual person is worse off.

With the size of government, they do the opposite. The size of the federal civil service, relative to the population is going down because the population is booming. They don't mention the government has never been bigger or more expensive. It’s the same in both Halifax (now over 5,000 employees) and Nova Scotia, which at about 12,000 core employees is roughly the same size as Alberta’s but with only one-quarter of the population according to Stats Can.

At about half a trillion dollars one can legitimately ask whether the federal government has simply grown too big, complex, and unwieldy to be managed at all, even if we assume the politicians in charge truly care about sound management. How many of the roughly 200 parliamentarians in a majority government—or 20 or so key cabinet ministers—have a sufficient understanding of the sprawling federal apparatus to provide meaningful oversight of the vast sums Ottawa is now spending?