Governments, Parties, and Public Sector Employees: Canada, United States, Britain, and France

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

This study of public-sector working conditions seeks to determine
whether left-wing parties provide better working conditions than
centrist parties, and whether, in turn, centrist parties provide better
working conditions than right-wing parties. The authors answer this
question by examining a number of the same criteria in each of four
countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

The evidence is reasonably consistent. In Canada, Liberal governments
from St. Laurent to Trudeau hired more public-sector workers than did
Conservatives from Diefenbaker to Mulroney, and the Liberal wage
settlements were more generous. Given that each party had three prime
ministers during the years in question (1953–1993), the evidence is
more than idiosyncratic. Public servants benefited when Democrats
controlled Congress in the United States, and British Labour governments
hired more civil servants than did Conservative ones. However, when
inflation is considered, Conservative wage settlements were slightly
more generous. The situation in France was more complicated.

On one front, the authors are sadly out of date. Democratically elected
governments, they say, “wish to be perceived ... as defending the
public interest rather than the interests of particular groups.” One
need not look beyond Canada for exceptions to that statement. Successive
Parti Québécois governments have demonstrated active hostility toward
Quebecers whose ancestors arrived before 1608 or after 1758. Ontario’s
Harris government makes no secret of its antipathy toward public-sector
employees and the province’s poor.

Now that one of the authors, Stephane Dion, has become a Liberal
cabinet minister, perhaps this book has acquired greater authority than
originally envisioned.