GUNTER: Want to cut federal operating expenses? Start with civil service
Lorne Gunter
Here’s a staggering statistic for you: Nearly 40 per cent of the federal civil service (147,000 of 373,000 federal bureaucrats) made in excess of $100,000 in 2024. The average Canadian made just shy of $68,000.
And that sum doesn’t include the bureaucrats’ retroactive pay raises paid out last year. Nor does it include their very expensive perks or the generous contributions Ottawa makes to its workers’ lavish pensions.
Thanks to some tenacious digging by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), who came up with the above figures, we know the 147,000 figure is a steep increase from the 111,000 federal civil servants who took in more than $100,000 in 2023. Indeed, it marks a 32 per cent increase in the number of $100k+ federal workers in just one year.
Another way to look at it: The last year of the Trudeau government was good — really, really good — for federal bureaucrats.
Indeed, all 10 years of the Trudeau government were richly rewarding for federal bureaucrats. According to the CTF, from 2015 when the Liberals took over until the end of last year, “the number of federal bureaucrats taking six-figure salaries more than tripled.”
There was inflation during those years, to be sure. That drove wages in the public and private sectors. So the number of civil servants making in excess of $100,000 would have gone up in part because inflation pushed wages higher.
But inflation didn’t cause a tripling of the 100,000 Club. That was mostly due to overly generous wage increases — increases well above those in the private sector — plus bonuses and generous perks.
During the Trudeau years, the federal civil service grew in size by 40 per cent. Meanwhile the cost of paying all 373,000 civil servants rose by 70 per cent. That means federal government wages were more than keeping up with inflation at a time when taxpayers — the Canadians who fund those wages — were often struggling to keep up.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) estimates the cost of all the add-ons, bonuses, pension contributions and benefits received by federal civil servants adds about 25 per cent above and beyond their salaries. The average in the private sector is about 17 per cent.
It’s little wonder that Pierre Poilievre lost his suburban Ottawa riding in April’s general election. The riding of Carleton is home to thousands of bureaucrats and Poilievre was promising to cut the size of the federal civil service at a time when those bureaucrats were on a tax-funded bender.
Recall, too, that many federal office workers now work largely from home and bristle at any suggestion that they should return to their offices and bear the costs of child care and gas, like the rest of Canadians.
Civil servants were told to come into the office at least three days a week starting last fall, but according to Statistics Canada’s latest figures on commuting, one in four people in Toronto is still working from home on any given day. One in five in Montreal and Vancouver. One in 10 in Saskatchewan. Meanwhile in Ottawa, the hub of the federal civil service, one in three is working from home.
Could it be that civil servants, with their higher pay, shorter working hours, longer vacations, earlier retirements and richer pensions are also ignoring the government’s return-to-the-office directives?
In many ways, federal civil servants have become a privileged economic class all their own.
The most frustrating part of all of this is that despite the massive increase in civil-service employment and the dramatic increase in pay, Canadians are not being any better served by Ottawa. Immigration is still out of control, housing prices are still unaffordable for many, waits for health care are troubling, crime and homelessness are persistent, the country’s economy is sluggish and, despite crushing environmental regulations, environmental outcomes have not improved much.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has tasked his ministers with cutting federal operating expenses by 15 per cent over the next three years. Guess where they should start.
