[Mull]

Originally Posted by opendoor

It's a deliberately misleading statistic, as simply recovering to February 2020 levels is a feat in itself. Here's how long it has taken to recover to prior peak private sector job numbers in the last 4 recessions in the US (I used the US because the data is easier to pull from and they're a good benchmark):

1990: 3 years and 2 months
2001: 4 years and 2 months
2008: 6 years and 4 months
2020: 2 years and 4 months

So to say "x % of job growth in the last 2 years and 5 months in Canada has been in the public sector" is more or less meaningless because in a normal recession, we wouldn't have expected to even get back to the baseline by this point. The fact that Canada got back to our prior number within 2 years (4 months faster than the US did) is a good thing. But obviously once you hit the point of recovery for private sector numbers, then nearly 100% of the growth will be in the public sector because the private sector has been in recovery for several years.

It's a bit like comparing bank interest to the stock market. If the stock market crashes and then recovers 2 years later, would it make sense to say "99% of the money my investments have returned in the last 2 years have been from my savings account. There's something wrong with the economy if the stock market can't even beat my bank account"? No, you wouldn't. Because stocks fluctuate just like private sector job numbers. And with both, if you cherry pick the period you're comparing, then you can easily make the numbers look bad.

The exact same thing happens every time there's private sector job loss from a recession, so anyone pretending it's unusual or unexpected is either being misleading or is ignorant.

Great info ty