EDITORIAL: Federal bureaucracy is out of control

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If Prime Minister Mark Carney is going to meet his election promise of holding the annual increase in the cost of running the federal government to less than 2% annually, he’s going to have to do a lot better than his election pledge of “capping, not cutting” the size of the federal public service.

Capping the size of the federal bureaucracy would mean endorsing the record of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, who increased those costs by almost 9% annually during his nearly decade in power.

The number of civil servants hired during that period grew by 98,986 to 357,965.

That was a 38% increase — more than triple the growth rate of Canada’s population during the same period — accompanied by a 72.9% hike in the total federal payroll to $69.5 billion last year compared to $40.2 billion in 2016-17.

While some of the increase was due to the pandemic, that was five years ago and the federal bureaucracy continued to increase every year after that, from 319,601 in 2020 to 357,965 at the end of the Trudeau era.

During that same period, according to parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux, the cost of hiring outside consultants more than doubled to $21.4 billion from $10.4 billion.

A recent Leger survey conducted for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation found that more than half of Canadians — 54% — want the federal bureaucracy cut, compared to only 4% who want it increased.

It also found that despite the explosive growth in the federal bureaucracy, half of those surveyed said the quality of federal government services has deteriorated since 2016, with only 11% saying it had improved.

A 2023 report by the parliamentary budget officer found that “less than 50% of (performance) targets” set by government departments “are consistently met within the same year.”

While Carney recently instructed most federal departments to produce plans to cut their program spending by 15% by the 2028-29 fiscal year, his election platform declared “federal workers deliver essential services to Canadians and are critical to helping Canada meet this moment of crisis,” referring to the ongoing trade war with the U.S.

So we won’t know until his first budget whether he’s serious about cutting the federal bureaucracy or whether it was just political rhetoric to get elected.

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