The NWT government of 2024 is much larger and more costly than it was even five years ago, the territory’s latest internal data shows.
Every year, the territorial government publishes a public service report that documents how many staff it has, where they come from, where they work, and how much they cost.
In the 2023-24 financial year, the NWT government had 6,479 employees, up from 5,289 in 2018-19. The big leap came from 2019 to 2021, when the GNWT added nearly 1,000 people in the space of two years.
The total cost of pay, benefits and other human resources expenses – ranging from removal vans to overtime – was $703 million in 2018-19. By 2023-24, it was $906 million. (The GNWT’s revenues and operating expenses have experienced similar leaps.)
Recent data from Statistics Canada showed that the public sector has become a bigger driver of the NWT’s economy than mining, oil and gas since Covid-19 arrived.
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With that in mind, we compared the latest GNWT public service report – released at the end of October – with reports going back to 2018 to see how things within the territorial government have changed as that broader shift was taking place.
On this page, you can explore the data through nine charts.
At the bottom of the page, we have linked directly to each year’s report so you can browse the data for yourself as it was originally published.
Staffing levels rose significantly during Covid-19, but the GNWT was already expanding before the pandemic hit: 500 jobs were created in the year immediately leading up to the pandemic, and just under 500 jobs were created in the pandemic’s first year.
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Some critics say governments of various types in the NWT are hiring at a rate that outpaces population growth. The Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce, for example, recently told the City of Yellowknife to closely scrutinize its proposed 2025 staffing for this reason.
Note that the territorial government’s annual reports define an employee as “someone on payroll occupying an active position,” meaning the figures shown are for people who have been hired and are in a job, rather than positions that might be vacant. The annual reports do not provide figures for overall numbers of positions or vacancy rates within the GNWT.
The number of senior managers at the GNWT has been a talking point for the Union of Northern Workers for some time.
In February this year, for example, the union questioned whether the GNWT was becoming “too top-heavy.”
The latest figures produced by the territory show the number of senior managers dropping from 268 to 259 after years of gradual growth.
The number of UNW members working at the GNWT rose from 4,998 to 5,045 between 2023 and 2024. The union now has more than a thousand extra members at the GNWT compared to 2019, with most of those gains coming between 2019 and 2021.
According to the GNWT’s data, the NWT’s health authority added some 600 employees – a 50-percent increase in staffing – between 2018 and 2023. That number came down slightly, from 1,891 to 1,870, in the past year.
The Department of Health and Social Services’ numbers fluctuated during the pandemic, when the GNWT brought on some staff and restructured itself for a time, introducing a Covid-19 Secretariat to manage its pandemic response.
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The Department of Justice is now the largest department at the GNWT (the health authority isn’t a department in its own right), overtaking the Department of Infrastructure.
The annual public service reports also track how management at the GNWT is changing.
The territory says the proportion of managers who are women, and senior managers who are Indigenous, is gradually growing over time.
By contrast, the percentage of the GNWT workforce that is Indigenous has dropped slightly in recent years.
The annual reports contain a variety of other figures that document how employees are faring.
One, for example, tracks the number of complaints received annually under the GNWT’s Harassment Free and Respectful Workplace Policy.
This appears to have experienced a spike in the past year.
Another tracks how much money employees collective donate through a payroll program to the charity United Way NWT – which in turn distributes funding to other non-profits.
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Note that the annual reports provide no commentary regarding the fluctuation in sums donated, and there are multiple reasons why those numbers might change. For example, in 2022 and 2023, there were major disaster relief campaigns within the territory that may have drawn donations through separate channels.
Read the reports
The GNWT publishes reports each year that set out all of this data and more (though the reports don’t always compare the data with other years as we have).
Use these links to access each of the reports we relied on for this article:
