Via Sara MacIntyre at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Vancouver Sun reports that 3 million Canadians work for government (either federal, provincial, or municipal), which is the highest ever:

“In total, close to 2.67 million people were working in the three levels of government — the highest level since 1994,” Statistics Canada said. However, it noted that was still slightly below the peak of 2.73 million in 1992, prior to the start of deep cuts in public-sector jobs by deficit-ridden provincial and federal governments.

Just more than half of all government workers were provincial or territorial civil servants, nearly a third were local government employees and 14 per cent were federal public servants, it said, adding that those proportions have remained relatively stable.

Government employment, which excludes those working for government business enterprises, has been increasing steadily since hitting a low of just over 2.5 million in 1999, with all three levels of government contributing to the 160,000 increase.

The provincial and territorial governments combined had nearly 1.4 million employees in 2004, up by 98,000 from 1999, while federal employment rose by 38,000 to 367,000, and local employment by 23,000 to 908,000.

…

The federal government, which underwent sharper percentage decreases in employment during the 1990s, has also posted steeper increases since 2000, although in total numbers the greatest increases have been at the provincial and local government levels.

Just over half of all provincial and territorial employees work for a health and social service institution, one-quarter are employed by the provincial and territorial general governments, and the remainder work for colleges and universities.

…

A criticism of Canadian job growth this year is that it has all been in either public service jobs, up by 45,000, or in self-employment. “In contrast, the number of private-sector employees has declined by 39,000 over the first four months of the year,” Statistics Canada said in its latest monthly jobs report.

Two dangers can be identified here:

1) governments can only pay its employees through tax revenues, which must be raised by taxing private enterprises, which is taking up a smaller and smaller part of the economy;

2) it’s bad for democracy when such a large percentage of “citizens” depend for their livelihoods on government’s policies and decisions. Edmund Burke called such people “pensioners.” Considered more closely, this dependence undermines the ability for citizens to speak out against government policies because they must constantly weigh whether their superiors will take revenge by denying them employment, promotion, a raise, or perhaps vengeance will be taken against their friend or their spouse. Consider the case of a Quesnel, BC, teacher/councillor who got fired over letters he wrote to a local newspaper critical of the school board’s policy toward sexual orientation. Moreover, how many people who work in private enterprise are married to or are otherwise very close to someone who does work for government? To what extent does fear of what might happen to a loved one hinder their criticisms of governmental policy?