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Lorne Gunter: No real effort by Ottawa to cut bloated federal bureaucracy

The only job categories that come anywhere close to being as well-compensated as civil servants are miners and oil and gas workers.

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On Tuesday, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released its analysis of federal spending on Ottawa’s bureaucracy.

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Talk by the Carney government of cuts to the civil service are largely misleading. Rather than getting smaller last year, the federal bureaucracy grew by about 7,000 employees. That’s an increase of 1.6%, slower than most years under the government of Justin Trudeau. However, it is still trending in the wrong direction.

The civil service is one of Ottawa’s largest expenses. It ranks right up there with transfers to provinces for health care and education, and with transfers to individuals, like pensions. Without deep cuts to the bureaucracy, there will be no way to get spending under control and balance the federal budget.

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However, the Carney government is making no real effort to reduce spending on Ottawa’s bureaucrats. The prime minister has promised to begin cuts this spring and continue until 2029. But the target is only 16,000 jobs trimmed, mostly through retirement and attrition. That works out to a “cut” of just 3.6 per cent (although the CBC still called that a “slash”).

Since the Liberals took over in 2015, the federal workforce has grown by 40% to 448,000 from 320,000. That makes the cuts promised by Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne just 12% of Ottawa’s new hires in the last decade, not 12 per cent of its total workforce.

In other words, Trudeau added 128,000 bureaucrats to Ottawa’s rolls, Carney is cutting just 16,000 of those.

And, according to the PBO, before the Liberals start cutting, they are padding their numbers a bit, adding 7,000 more bureaucrats before trimming 16,000. That makes the promised net cut just 9,000.

The PBO said spending on the federal payroll has risen by 80% since the Liberals took over in 2015. And it keeps rising.

But here’s the explanation for why the bureaucracy is such a huge chunk of the budget (and therefore has to be cut much more than planned if federal expenditures are to be brought back down to Earth).

According to the PBO report, “Total compensation per full-time federal employee reached $143,271 last year, marking a second consecutive year with historically high growth in spending per full-time equivalent position.”

The $143,000 includes “salaries and wages, pension compensation, overtime, bilingual bonuses and other employee-related benefits,” but not the lump sum payments they received to end their 2023 strike nor any annual performance bonuses.

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Equivalent compensation for the average Canadian worker amounts to just over $80,000 — about 56% of what it costs in pay and perks for federal civil servant.

The only job categories that come anywhere close to being as well-compensated as civil servants are miners and oil and gas workers.

The bureaucracy cost taxpayers $71.9 billion in 2023-24. Thanks to the incremental wage increases the federal government granted its workers to end their strike three summers ago, that total will rise to $76.3 billion this year.

This far exceeds the increase in the cost of living and means while taxpayers struggle to pay for groceries, federal civil servants are making out like bandits. It also puts civil servants close to the top 5% of all income earners in the country.

Still, according to a poll conducted by Leger for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), half of respondents said federal services have gotten worse since 2016.

I’m surprised it’s only half who said that.

“More government bureaucrats taking more money from taxpayers hasn’t resulted in better services for Canadians,” Franco Terrazzano, the federal director of the CTF, said. “Canadians can’t afford to pay higher taxes to fund Ottawa’s bloated and underperforming bureaucracy.”

One-quarter of all federal workers could be laid off and I’m willing to bet no one would notice.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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