Government employee in Canada here. The pay itself is not necessarily the best, but top notch benefits, generous vacation (maybe a moot point in Netherlands but definitely not here), a rock solid pension make it a lot closer than the salary number alone.
There's also the fact that the number of hours worked is always fair, and that you can move within the public service very easily.
How many big projects are handled mostly "in house" by the government in Canada. And for the outsourced ones, how much input / leadership do the internal government people have?
Because it is largely the outsourced big projects where our Government fails.
The situation is not very different here: the outsourced projects often fail, and lots of the big ones are outsourced. Definitely not a good use of public funds (my opinion), especially since the funds spent for such projects are often stratospheric. Also, the amount of talent in government is not THAT small, so often these decisions seem very political.
There's also the fact that the number of hours worked is always fair, and that you can move within the public service very easily.