Let me say this plainly, while I still can: it isn't illegal yet to notice the thing I'm about to point out. It isn't illegal to write it down. It isn't illegal to publish it, or for you to read it. I keep stressing the yet, because that's the whole mood of the thing. We are, allegedly, free. So let's exercise the freedom before somebody decides we've had enough of it.

Here's the thing I can't stop turning over.

More than one in five working Canadians draws a paycheque from the government. Not a contractor. Not a vendor. An actual public-sector worker — federal, provincial, or municipal, including the people in health care, education, and social services. The latest numbers put it at about 21.5% of the workforce, one of the highest shares in over thirty years. And where I'm sitting, in Atlantic Canada, it's worse — or better, depending on who signs your cheque — at nearly 30%.

Sit with that for a second. Round it down to be generous. Imagine a room of one hundred working people, and twenty of them work for the same boss. One boss. Twenty employees in a hundred. That is not a footnote. That is a voting bloc, a readership, an advertising base, and a source list, all at once.

Now ask yourself an honest question. If you ran a newspaper in that room — a real one, a "free press" one — how eager would you be to publish a hard story about the boss? About how the boss failed somebody? Wasted money? Broke a promise? You'd think about it. You'd think about the twenty. You'd think about their spouses and their pensions and their subscriptions and the government ad spend that quietly keeps your lights on. And somewhere in that thinking, without anyone ever sending you a memo, the story gets a little softer. Or it doesn't run at all.

Nobody has to censor anything. You just need the math. Twenty in a hundred is enough math.

If it were seven in a hundred? Different story. Seven people don't scare a newsroom. Seven people don't scare anybody. You could write whatever you wanted about a boss who only employed seven of your hundred.

Which brings me, naturally, to China.

We are told — constantly, breathlessly — that China is the cautionary tale. The cage. The place with the grip on its people, where the state is in everything and everyone is afraid. And I'm not here to defend the Chinese government; I lived next door to it for fifteen years and I have my own opinions. But here's the number nobody quotes. By the same measuring stick we use for Canada's 21.5 percent, the share of Chinese workers on the public payroll is around 23%. Some estimates put it higher.

And the comforting fiction works precisely because twenty out of a hundred people have every reason to keep believing it, and the press that might puncture it has every reason to let them.

While we're handing out cautionary tales, let's talk about the United States. The land of the free. The land that locks up more of its own people than almost any nation on the planet — at the peak, roughly one in a hundred American adults behind actual bars, and still, after a decade of decline, one of the highest incarceration rates on Earth. A real prison, mind you, not a metaphor. An industrial one, with shareholders. The money's good because the customers can't leave.

And the dollar stays valuable because if you decide you'd rather not use it, they will shoot you.  There's a military for that. I'm sure the United States wasn't in Iraq because broccoli was its main export. It definitely had nothing to do with what comes out of the ground there and what currency you're obligated to buy it in. Clinton-on-Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died style! Did I miss something? Because from where I'm standing it sure looks like the petrodollar and the carrier groups are two ends of the same handshake. But what do I know. I'm just a guy doing the arithmetic out loud, which is — say it with me — not illegal yet.

Here's what kills me about the Canadian version of all this. If seven people really could run a hundred — if government were that lean and that cheap — wouldn't we be paying our teachers like the future depended on them? Wouldn't there be money left over for the things we say we care about? Instead we've built something enormous and slow and increasingly less productive per dollar, and we've made it the largest single employer of the people whose job it supposedly is to question it. The waste is epic. And it is too bad — genuinely, infuriatingly too bad — that a certain stratum of the permanently comfortable in Ottawa cannot be bothered to notice it, let alone fix it.

They certainly couldn't be bothered to notice me.

I'm a Canadian. I came home after spending most of my adult life abroad, building something, learning things this country could actually use. I have sent out more than four hundred résumés. I am not holding out for a corner office. I am asking, more or less, for a job. Any job. Doing anything at all. And the going rate for that, I'm told, is to wait — a year, a year and a half, sometimes two — and to treat that wait as normal. As just how it is.  The Door Painted on the Wall. 

It doesn't seem right, does it? It isn't right. And the reason you don't read more about it — about a government that quietly fails the very citizens it claims to serve, one returning Canadian at a time — is the same reason you don't read much that's truly hard about that government at all. Twenty in a hundred. The math does the censoring so no one has to.

I'm writing this because I love this country enough to tell it the truth: you can do better than this. I'd like to be useful to it. At minimum, I can be the guy who says the quiet part while saying it is still allowed.

So here it is. In writing. While it's not illegal yet.