The Trudeau government’s addiction to hiring bureaucrats continues unabated. 

The government added another 10,525 bureaucrats to its payroll last year, bringing the size of the federal bureaucracy up to 367,772, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat released July 11. 

“Was there a bureaucrat shortage in Ottawa before Trudeau took over?” said Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “Canadians need a more efficient government, not a bloated government full of highly paid bureaucrats.”

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, the feds have added 108,793 new bureaucrats to the government dole – an increase of 42 per cent. 

Canada’s population grew by just 14 per cent during the same time period. Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal employees today.  

Table: Size of federal bureaucracy, per TBS data

It isn’t just the size of the federal bureaucracy that’s ballooning – the cost is too. 

The cost of the federal payroll hit $67.4 billion in 2023, a record high, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Ottawa’s independent, non-partisan budget watchdog. 

That’s a 68 per cent increase over 2016, when the federal payroll sat at 40.2 billion. 

The Trudeau government also handed out more than one million pay raises to bureaucrats over the past four years alone, according to government records obtained by the CTF. 

The government has consistently declined to reveal how much those raises cost taxpayers. 

The federal government also rubberstamped more than $1.5 billion in bonuses for bureaucrats since 2015. 

Meanwhile, despite the bureaucratic hiring spree, spending on consultants has also skyrocketed under the Trudeau government. Consultant spending now sits at $21.6 billion annually.

Given the rash of bonuses and pay raises, on top of spate of new hires, Canadians might wonder: how well are things running in Ottawa? 

Well, the reviews are in and the results aren’t good. 

Less than 50 per cent of the government’s own performance targets are consistently met by federal departments within each year, according to a March 2023 report from the PBO.

“We've seen an increase in the number of public servants and in public expenditures, but year after year, despite the fact that departments choose their performance indicators and the targets, they don't seem to be getting significantly better at reaching them,” Budget Officer Yves Giroux testified to a parliamentary committee in March 2024.  

The average annual compensation for full-time federal bureaucrats is $125,300, when pay, pension, and other perks are accounted for, according to the PBO. 

Meanwhile, data from Statistics Canada suggests the average annual salary among all full-time workers in Canada was less than $70,000 in 2023. 

“The feds have hired tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, handed out more than one million raises and rubber stamped hundreds of million in bonuses in recent years and still can’t deliver good services,” Terrazzano said. “Any government that cares about balancing the budget must take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”