The federal government has a habit it can’t seem to break: hiring more bureaucrats.

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, the feds have added more than 98,000 new bureaucrats onto the government payroll. 

That trend shows no signs of slowing down, with 21,290 extra staff added last year.

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

The federal government now employs 357,247 bureaucrats, according to the latest data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, released June 26. 

To put that in perspective: there are now more than 98,000 extra government employees on the taxpayer dole than there was when Trudeau came to power.

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

The cost of the federal bureaucracy grew by 31 per cent over the past two years, according to an April 2023 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The government handed out 802,043 raises to federal bureaucrats from 2020 through 2022, according to internal government records previously obtained by the CTF. 

Meanwhile, the feds paid out $1.3 billion in bonuses since 2015. 

Given the rash of bonuses and pay raises, on top of the spate of fresh 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.

Despite this, the average annual compensation for a full-time federal bureaucrat 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 about $64,000 in 2022.  

“Taxpayers have paid for hundreds of thousands of pay raises, hundreds of millions in bonuses and for tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats and the government still can’t meet half of its own performance targets,” Terrazzano said. “Trudeau needs to take some air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”

The federal government currently employs so much staff, it can’t even keep track of where they’re working. 

In May, the TBS confirmed “it is not possible to determine the number of [bureaucrats] working from home versus those working in the office.”