In order to be sure we are comparing like with like, our analysis includes both provincial and local government employees in each province to account for the differences in the distribution of responsibilities of the two levels of government within each province. [...] The point of our comparison is to try and establish some measures of the value that local residents are getting for the money spent on provincial and municipal services compared to citizens of other provinces. [...] Similarly, if the ERPs have many more civil servants than other jurisdictions, equalization is simply being used to support unnecessary levels of public sector employment, since the other jurisdictions offer a reasonable benchmark of the level of public sector employment that is really required to offer the full range of provincial and local public services. [...] If we simply compare the average wages for public servants in each province, as in Chart 1, things look as they should given the relative size of the economies of the different provinces. [...] While some provinces thus appear to inflate the wages of their public servants, others appear to be inflating the size of the public service.