Are Canadians getting real value for the billions flowing into government?

That’s the question we asked in a Macdonald-Laurier Institute panel discussion in November. Building on Stephen Tapp, PhD’s new paper ‘The Growing Government Gap’ and previewing the forthcoming Size of Government Index (SGI) and Government Productivity Index (GPI), former Chief Statistician of Canada PhD Munir Sheikh, and Scotiabank VP and Chief Economist Jean-Francois Perrault joined Tim Sargent and I for a conversation on productivity in the public sector last week.

To the surprise of few, our government has grown considerably in the past two decades, produces significantly less as a result, and has moved further away from comparable private sector productivity.

A fifth of the Canadian population now works in government.

Service quality and outcomes aren’t improving. Health-care wait times, K–12 results, and administrative backlogs are worsening despite higher costs and larger workforces.

If the public sector had simply matched private-sector productivity growth, Canada’s GDP would be $32 billion higher today.

And the Federal government has started playing in the lanes of the provinces more and more, with recent forays into childcare, pharmacare, and now school lunch programs.

There are plenty of opportunities for better management of our public sector. Stay tuned for the forthcoming papers that outline the size and productivity indices, and dive into the data at the provincial and territorial levels.