Most Canadians want to shrink bloated public service: Poll

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OTTAWA — With Canada’s bureaucracy seeing unprecedented growth since 2015, new polling suggests Canadians want to put the bloated public service on a crash diet.

Released Tuesday, new poll numbers from Leger suggest 47% of Canadians want to reduce the size of Canada’s bureaucracy, which has grown 42% since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power.

With undecided voters removed, the number of respondents who want to see a leaner public service grows to 56%.

“The poll shows taxpayers know they’re paying for too many federal paper pushers and want Ottawa to shrink the bureaucracy,” said Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation — the government spending watchdog who also commissioned the poll.

“Canadians can’t afford to keep bankrolling a bloated federal bureaucracy.”

Canada’s federal public service ballooned by more than 10,000 new positions last year, putting the population of public servants in this country at a record high of 367,772 employees.

Trudeau’s time in office saw the public service grow by nearly 110,000 positions, or 42% — while Canada’s population only grew by around 14% across the same time period.

In the poll, 47% of respondents wanted to reduce the number of federal workers, while 29% wanted the federal government to maintain staffing levels as they are, and only 7% thought Canada should increase the number of public servants.

Most of those (71%) who wanted to shrink the public service said they intended to vote Conservative in the next election, while those opting for the status quo were pretty evenly split between supporting the Liberals, New Democrats, Bloc Québécois and Green Party voters.

Of those who wanted to hire more public servants, most supported the NDP.

Polling was conducted July 26-28 of 1,601 Canadians of voting age. As margins of error don’t apply to online panels, one comparable to this sample size would be no greater than +/- 2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

Leger executive vice-president Andrew Enns tells the Toronto Sun that concern over the side of Canada’s ballooning public service seems to be growing in lockstep with Canada’s ongoing affordability crisis.

“You see households making adjustments, and things just aren’t going as far in terms of their paycheques,” he said, adding that increased costs of living are prompting everyday Canadians to pay closer attention to federal spending.

“Their focus is obviously on their households, but when you start hearing about big spending numbers coming out of Ottawa, it doesn’t take much to say, ‘Where’s all that money coming from?'”

bpassifiume@postmedia.com

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