The number of employees on the federal government’s payroll has increased three times more than the population of Canada has since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office.
Since 2016, just after Trudeau took office, the federal public service has increased by over 108,000 people, or 42%, according to data released by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
During the same period, Canada’s population has only increased by just over five million people or 14%.
Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told True North that ordinary taxpayers are paying the price for the hiring spree.
“The federal bureaucracy consumes more than half of the federal government’s day-to-day spending, so higher taxes and debt are a direct result of Trudeau’s ballooning bureaucracy,” he said.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation noted that the cost of the federal payroll reached a record high of $67.4 billion last year. This is a 68% increase since 2016 when the federal government payroll was $40.2 billion.
In the most recent fiscal year, the Liberals dished out $406 million in bonuses to federal departments and Crown corporations.
These bonuses come despite the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, reporting that fewer than 50% of the government’s own performance targets are being met.
“We’ve seen an increase in the number of public servants and in public expenditures, but year after year, despite the fact that departments choose their own performance indicators and the targets, they don’t seem to be getting significantly better at reaching them,” Giroux testified to a parliamentary committee.
Between 2023 and 2024, an additional 10,000 people joined the federal public service, pushing the total from 357,247 to 367,772.
The Treasury Board told True North that the federal public service’s growth rate slowed to 2.9% last year, down from a 5.5% growth rate between 2017 and 2023.
The federal committee said that the 2024 budget announced $4.2 billion in savings over four years.
“These savings will be primarily achieved through natural attrition in the federal public service of around 5,000 full-time equivalents over the next four years,” said a spokesperson.
The spokesperson added that government spending dedicated to personnel has remained relatively stagnant over the last decade.
“This is about smarter government, not smaller government, and the government of Canada will continue to prioritize high-quality service delivery to Canadians,” said the spokesperson.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation pointed out that this doesn’t change the reality of a ballooning public sector.
“The feds have hired tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, handed out more than one million raises, and rubber-stamped hundreds of millions in bonuses in recent years and still can’t deliver good services,” said Terrazzano.
While the Liberals’ hiring spree has seen the federal public service’s employment balloon, all government employees in Canada have grown at a smaller rate.
Between Oct. 2015 and June 2024, the number of public sector employees in Canada has grown from 3,554,500 to 4,412,100, an increase of just over 24%.
Meanwhile, the private sector has grown from 11,709,000 to 13,430,100 employees between 2016 and now, an increase of 14.7%.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation said that the average salary for a full-time federal employee is $125,300. The average salary for a full-time working Canadian was less than $70,000 in 2023.
Terrazzano said any government that wants to balance the budget “must take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”
The Liberals’ 2024 budget proposed $111.2 billion in new spending over the next five years, a $40 billion deficit, and no plan to balance the budget.
“Canadians need a more efficient government, not a bloated government full of highly paid bureaucrats,” said Terrazzano. “Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal paper-pushers today.”