A city whose largest employer is a government

It did not feel like a decision at the time. In this city a career that starts inside a federal department is close to the default, and defaults do not present themselves as options. Mine was an agency, assessing audit reports and testing controls over financial reporting, and nobody I knew thought there was anything to remark on in that.

What I did not understand until much later is that a city with one enormous stable employer does not just employ a lot of people. It sets the local definition of a reasonable life, and everything else gets priced against that definition, including things that have nothing to do with the employer at all.

The benchmark is not a salary

If it were only pay, the comparison would be easy and people would make it constantly.

What an anchor institution of that kind actually offers is a variance profile. Sequenced levels, a defined pension, a process for almost everything, and a very high degree of confidence that the employer will still be there in twenty years and will still be running something recognisable. Whatever you think of that as a place to work, and people who work there have plenty of opinions, it is an extraordinarily low-variance proposition.

Once that is the reference point, the cost of leaving is not a salary difference. It is the difference in spread. A person weighing something uncertain here is not comparing it against unemployment or against a shaky private employer. They are comparing it against a floor that is unusually high and unusually reliable, and a floor like that is genuinely hard to beat on expected value once you weight it for how much certainty is actually worth to a household.

You can see it in what counts as sensible advice. “Get in, get established” is ordinary counsel in this city and would sound strange in several others. It is not conservatism. It is a correct reading of the local numbers.

What it does to who builds things

So the people who start things here are, disproportionately, people for whom the floor is not available or not attractive. Newcomers to the country. People whose credentials do not translate cleanly. People already outside the system for one reason or another.

That is not a shortage of ambition and I want to be careful about the way that observation usually gets made. Ottawa is full of people who could run something and have run the arithmetic and concluded, correctly for them, that the trade is poor. The version of this you hear at conferences, where a city is scolded for a risk culture, treats a rational response to a good option as a character defect.

The part I had wrong

I read it as timidity for years, and I was smug about it, and that was both unattractive and inaccurate.

The correction came from noticing what the anchor produces that nobody credits. This city is unusually good at documentation. People here write things down, keep records that survive the person who made them, and are comfortable with process in a way I did not appreciate until I worked with organisations that had none. That habit is a direct product of the institution everyone complains about, and it is worth a great deal, and I have spent a good part of the last few years importing it into places that had been operating without it.

There is a second correction, which is that the floor is not available to everyone equally. Talking about a city’s risk appetite as though it were one attitude held by one population flattens the fact that the option being weighed is not the same option for everybody in it.

I registered a company here, which proves nothing

I registered a company here anyway, which proves nothing. One person’s decision is not evidence about a distribution, and I know better than to use it that way, and I notice I want to.