A lot of workers have endured tough times ever since COVID-19 began to cause harm to our economy and society. But one group that has been largely spared these pains is public sector workers.
A series of freedom of information documents sourced by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation shows just how easy public servants had it compared to many of their private sector counterparts.
As Sun columnist Brian Lilley recently explained: “A total of 528,347 government employees at the federal and provincial levels received raises in 2020 and 2021 when employment for many Canadians was precarious. That included 312,825 federal civil servants with the rest spread across all 10 provinces.”
The federal civil service also added almost 20,000 jobs between March 2020 and March 2021. This happened at a time when the broader unemployment rate soared from its pre-pandemic figure of 5.6% to — at one point — a staggering 13.7%.
Canadians shouldn’t begrudge anybody for securing a job in the civil service. Nor should we fault any particular person for receiving a raise.
But there are two big lessons in all of this.
The first is that there are some people who have done quite well and been fairly comfortable, at least in terms of job security, throughout the pandemic. They should keep in mind that not everyone has had it this way.
There have been quite a lot of people who have despaired over the past two years as they’ve lost their jobs, lost wage hours to support their family or even lost much of their life savings trying to keep their businesses afloat.
The other big lesson goes to our politicians and senior civil servants.
They need to make sure that the public sector operates within more or less the same reality as the private sector. They can never forget that without the private sector, there would be no public sector.
It’s not right that politicians and senior bureaucrats received raises when they were the ones locking the country down and making it that much more difficult for others to support their own families.
Compensation and benefits needs to be reasonable and be seen to be fair. What these new figures reveal is not fair and not reasonable.
We’re supposed to be all in this together.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2022
