B.C.’s public sector growing at unsustainable rate, business group warns

A major business group is taking aim at what it says is unsustainable growth in British Columbia’s public sector.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) says the B.C. public sector has grown by about 210,000 employees since the NDP took power in 2017, based on the province’s own data.

“This is a significant increase in public sector costs and a warning sign that we need to get costs under control if we’re going to get the budget back on track,” said Ryan Mitton, CFIB director of legislative affairs for B.C.

Nearly three-quarters of that growth came in health, community social services and public education, with the rest of the growth distributed between the public service, Crown corporations, and post-secondary institutions.

The group says the growth has resulted in a $14.4-billion increase in total labour costs to the provincial budget.

Mitton said that while B.C.’s population grew 15.5 per cent over that period, while the public sector grew 36.1 per cent and the private sector grew just 9.7 per cent.

He said more troubling, however, is where the growth has been in the public sector.

“Management and executive costs have also increased significantly,” he said.

“In some cases, for example in health care, management has seen a greater growth than doctors and even nurses and that’s a cause for concern because really at the end of the day we want those expenses to be going to front-line services.”

According to the data, B.C. has 16.6 front-line workers for every manager in the public education sector, three 10.6 workers per manager in colleges and universities, and 3.8 workers to a manager in the health care system.

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During last year’s provincial election campaign, the NDP government pledged to make changes to the province’s health authorities, but so far that has not happened.

“That’s really the big problem when you see large growth in health care numbers, but it’s heavily at administrative, it’s not front-line service providers in health care,” BC Conservative finance critic Peter Milobar said.

“It’s one manager for every four employees in health care. No other operation would operate with those ratios.”

B.C. Finance Minister Brenda Bailey was not available for an interview on Wednesday. In a financial update last week, she reported that the province ended the fiscal year with a $7.3 billion deficit, while the total provincial debt hit $99 billion.

The province has initiated a public service hiring freeze, and has initiated a fiscal review with the goal of identifying savings across ministries.

But the Opposition says it’s not confident the government will come up with much.

“The government is asking the management where to cut back and we know it’s management that needs to be cut back so they’re not going to offer up their jobs,” Milobar said.

“It takes some strength within the ministerial roles within every single ministry to get things back on track.”

The CFIB, meanwhile, is warning that costs could escalate as the province negotiates new collective agreements with public sector unions.

It is calling on the province to maintain its hiring freeze, review management growth and focus on economic growth rather than new taxes to pay for the public sector.

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