On Wednesday, the Tories set out clear benchmarks for the public service cleanup. The plan is to not replace employees when they leave, the party’s deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman,
told the National Post. Given that around 17,000 staff members end their service each year, that will reduce the size of the federal workforce by upwards of 68,000 positions over a four-year mandate.
Since the ascension of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the federal public service has
grown by about 111,000 staff members — from about 257,000 during Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s last year in government, to roughly 368,000 in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
(In the same period, the general population grew 15 per cent)
The federal workforce has added around 111,000 staff members since Trudeau took office
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The painfully inflated bureaucracy is a huge cost to taxpayers. But it also threatens to block much-needed reforms. Nearly a third of the federal workforce was hired under Trudeau-government values, and have worked under the Trudeau government’s expectations.
The majority —
60,000 — of Trudeau-era hires have gone to just six federal departments and agencies. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is one mega beneficiary, which saw its staff double (the feds now
plan to cut 3,300 jobs back). The others are the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Employment and Social Development Canada, as well as the fisheries, defence and procurement departments.
But pinning all the government’s faults on a lack of manpower alone would require every department to be running at perfect efficiency, which we all know isn’t happening. The immigration office is struggling with massive backlogs as it
cobbles together anti-racism plans, while Employment and Social Development Canada now has more work to do in administering the Liberals’ new daycare and dental programs — and
dreaming up new plans to expand federal diversity quotas.
Similar stories can no doubt be found in other departments that have curried favour with the current government. From 2021 to 2024, Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations grew from 8,742 employees to 10,725, an increase of 23 per cent. In 2015, these departments had just 4,684 staff members. The more-than-doubling of staff has no doubt contributed to the fact that, last year, the government
spent double the amount on those two Indigenous portfolios than it did on national defence.
Other big spikes include: Infrastructure Canada’s headcount
more than doubled from 2021 to 2024; from 2015 to 2024, the Privy Council Office saw its personnel numbers
rise by 77 per cent; from 2017 to 2024, the Public Health Agency of Canada
nearly doubled; the government IT department of Shared Services Canada has grown by 81 per cent since 2015; and Statistics Canada
ballooned by 48 per cent.
The most extreme case of bloat could be
found in the bowels of Women and Gender Equality Canada, which more than quadrupled its workforce under Trudeau, expanding to 443 employees in 2024, from 92 in 2015…’cuz it’s 2015-ish?
Waste and over-extension are endemic to the current government, which is why some serious belt-tightening over the next few years shouldn’t be a problem. And it’s clear that even Trudeau, the public-sector cheerleader that he is, doesn’t think his current employees can do the work: every year, his spending on private consulting firms rises by another billion or so,
reaching $15 billion in 2023.
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