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GOLDSTEIN: Bigger government doesn’t mean better government

From 2015 to 2025, the federal bureaucracy grew by almost 40%.

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If bigger government meant better government, our federal government would get the gold medal for making the lives of Canadian better.

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The operative word is “if”.

GOLDSTEIN: Bigger government doesn’t mean better government Back to video

The “old” Liberal government under Justin Trudeau, as opposed to the “new” Liberal government, as it calls itself, under Mark Carney, cracked the code for bigger government.

From 2015 to 2025, the federal bureaucracy grew by almost 40%, from 257,034 employees to 357,965, an increase of more than 100,000.

According to the parliamentary budget officer, the federal payroll increased by 80% during that period, from $39.6 billion in 2015 to $71.4 billion in 2024-25.

While there’s no definitive figure I could find for the cost of paying a full-time equivalent (FTE) position in the public service in 2015 – including salaries, pensions and benefits – it has also increased rapidly, from $136,345 in 2023-24 to $143,271 in 2024-25, which the PBO described as “marking a second consecutive year with historically high growth in spending per FTE.”

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In addition to the rapid increase in the size and cost of the public service, the PBO also said the government in 2023 was spending $21.4 billion annually hiring outside help – 106% more than the $10.4 billion spent on consultants when Trudeau took power in 2015 — despite promising to decrease use of consultants.

The growth and cost of running the federal civil service have far outpaced the 15% increase in Canada’s population between 2015 (35,606,734) and 2024 (41,012,563); the 18.5% real growth rate of the economy; the 15.5% increase in total employment and the 25.5% increase in employment across the public sector, counting all orders of government.

As Peter Nicholson, a former senior federal public servant and business executive, wrote in a policy paper last year for the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan titled Is the federal public service too big?:

“There is no reason to expect the growth of the civil service to match, much less exceed, population growth. Other things being equal, we would hope that increased productivity — e.g., through investment in information technology, better work processes, and management training — would bring public service growth below that of the population.

“By 2024, the number of federal public servants per 1,000 population had reached the highest ratio (9.0) in at least 40 years.”

Some of these increases are attributed to new federal programs such as dental care and pharmacare and increased hiring to respond to the 2020 pandemic.

But the pandemic was six years ago and the size of the federal bureaucracy continued to increase every year after that, from 300,450 positions in 2020 to 319,601 in 2021; 335,957 in 2022; 357,247 in 2023 and 367,772 in 2024, before a slight dip to 357,965 in early 2025.

Carney, when he was running for the Liberal leadership, cited the fact the federal government’s operational spending was growing at a rate of 9% annually under Trudeau as one of the reasons the Canadian economy was weak before U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs.

Last year’s federal budget outlined plans to reduce the size of the public service by 40,000 positions by 2028-29, from its highest level in 2024, down to about 330,000, through layoffs, attrition and early retirements.

This would cut the size of the public service to slightly below what it was in 2022, two years into the pandemic, and thus hardly draconian, despite predictable claims from the public sector unions that it will gut services to the public.

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