Sometimes you can't be Quiet

Sometimes you can't be quiet. I was reading a blog today that was slagging John Gormley's position on the provincial government. Okay, John's a big enough guy to take the stuff that is being said, but what was being said in the comments almost made me sick.

As with the way things go, I started to do a reply, but thought I ought to step up and write something original. What I did was start looking at our current provincial situation in relation to the SGEU. I found a Stats Can table that shows the following information for 2005:

Saskatchewan Provincial business enterprises
# of Employees = 13,632
Wages and Salaries ($ thousands) = 635,043

Alberta Provincial business enterprises
# of employees = 3,131
Wages and Salaries ($ thousands) = 81,434

Check it here.

Obviously this comparison shows the difference in political ideology in practice. Next, I found a document for each of Saskatchewan and Alberta showing populations for the same time frame:

Saskatchewan = 990,930 (from Saskatchewan Annual Population report 2005)
Alberta = 3,182,178 (from Alberta 2005 Official Population List)

So we have roughly 4 times the # of employees in government run businesses, and pay them 7 times the amount that Alberta does in total (or almost twice as much per employee).

Now do you support their strike?