Federal government should listen to Canadians and trim the bureaucracy

Under Prime Minister Trudeau the government has introduced sweeping national programs in the areas of dental care, daycare and pharmacare, increased cash transfers to some Canadians while also spending billions on corporate welfare.

Under the Trudeau government, the number of federal government employees has grown substantially, and new polling shows that many Canadians would prefer to see that number decline. This would be a step in the right direction, as the growing size of government imposes costs on Canadians with little to no evidence suggesting they’re better off because of it.

Specifically, from 2015 (the year Prime Minister Trudeau was first elected) to March 2024 (the latest month of available data), the number of federal employees grew from 257,034 to 367,772. In other words, in nine years the Trudeau government has increased the size of the federal bureaucracy by 43.1 per cent, nearly three times the rate of population growth (15.2 per cent) over that same period.

In response, many Canadians believe the government should begin cutting back. According a recent poll, when made aware of this increase, nearly half (47 per cent) of respondents said the federal government should start reducing the number of employees while only 7 per cent said the government should hire more.

The growth of the federal public service is part of the Trudeau government’s approach to governance, which has been to increase Ottawa’s involvement in the economy and day-to-day lives of Canadians. Under Prime Minister Trudeau the government has introduced sweeping national programs in the areas of dental care, daycare and pharmacare, increased cash transfers to some Canadians while also spending billions on corporate welfare.

In other words, the Trudeau government has vastly increased the size of government in Canada.

One way to understand the size of government is to measure government spending as a share of the overall economy (GDP), which shows the extent to which economic activity is directly or indirectly controlled by government activities. From 2014/15 to 2024/25, total federal spending (as a share of GDP) will increase from 14.1 per cent to a projected 17.9 per cent—meaning federal bureaucrats now control a larger share of economic activity than they did before the Trudeau government came to power.

Of course, Canadian taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for a larger federal government, and 86 per cent of middle-income Canadians now pay higher taxes than in 2015. Yet for all this increased spending and taxation, it’s unclear Canadians are better off.

In fact, inflation-adjusted GDP per person (a broad measure of living standards) has been in a historic decline since mid-2019, and as of the second quarter of 2024 it sat below the level it was at the end of 2014. And recent polling shows that 74 per cent of respondents feel the average Canadian family is overtaxed, while 44 per cent feel they receive “poor” or “very poor” value from government services.

Clearly, the federal government should break from the status quo and take a different approach focused on smaller and smarter government. A good first step would be to listen to Canadians and trim the number of bureaucrats.

Authors:

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Grady Munro

Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute

Subs

Up Next

TikTok partners with WHO to train influencers, ‘combat misinformation’

Don't Miss

Harm Reduction is a Lie: Red Deer South MLA Jason Stephan

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

UN Chief Rages Against Dying Of Climate Alarm Light

Business / 3 hours ago

U.S. Supreme Court frosty on Trump’s tariff power as world watches

Justice / 8 hours ago

Carney government lets Supreme Court decision stand despite outrage over child porn ruling

Daily Caller

UN Chief Rages Against Dying Of Climate Alarm Light

Published on November 6, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The light of the global climate alarm movement has faded throughout 2025, as even narrative-pushing luminaries like Bill Gates have begun admitting. But that doesn’t mean the bitter clingers to the net-zero by 2050 dogma will go away quietly. No one serves more ably as the poster child of this resistance to reality than U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, who is preparing to host the UN’s annual climate conference, COP30, in Brazil on Nov. 10.

In a speech on Monday, Guterres echoed poet Dylan Thomas’s advice to aging men and women in his famed poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night:”

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dear Readers:

As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers.

Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.

Thank you!

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Seeing that his own words have “forked no lightning,” Guterres raged, raged against the dying of the climate alarm light.

“Governments must arrive at the upcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil with concrete plans to slash their own emissions over the next decade while also delivering climate justice to those on the front lines of a crisis they did little to cause,” Guterres demanded, adding, “Just look at Jamaica.”

Yes, because, as everyone must assuredly know, the Earth has never produced major hurricanes in the past, so it must be the all-powerful climate change bogeyman that produced this major storm at the end of an unusually slow Atlantic hurricane season.

Actually, Guterres’ order to all national governments to arrive in Belem, Brazil outfitted with aspirational plans to meet the net-zero illusion, which everyone knows can and will never be met, helps explain why President Donald Trump will not be sending an official U.S. delegation. Trump has repeatedly made clear – most recently during his September speech before the U.N. General Assembly – that he views the entire climate change agenda as a huge scam. Why waste taxpayer money in pursuit of a fantasy when he’s had so much success pursuing a more productive agenda via direct negotiations with national leaders around the world?

“The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda…focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to the Guardian. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” she added.

The Guardian claims that Rogers’s use of the word “scam” refers to the Green New Deal policies pursued by Joe Biden. But that’s only part of it: The President views the entire net-zero project as a global scam designed to support a variety of wealth redistribution schemes and give momentum to the increasingly authoritarian forms of government we currently see cracking down in formerly free democracies like the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia and other western developed nations.

Trump’s focused efforts on reversing vast swaths of Biden’s destructive agenda is undoing 16 years of command-and-control regulatory schemes implemented by the federal government. The resulting elimination of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies is already slowing the growth of the electric vehicles industry and impacting the rise of wind and solar generation as well.

But the impacts are international, too, as developing nations across the world shift direction to be able to do business with the world’s most powerful economy and developed nations in Europe and elsewhere grudgingly strive to remain competitive. Gates provided a clear wake-up call highlighting this global trend with his sudden departure from climate alarmist orthodoxy and its dogmatic narratives with his shift in rhetoric and planned investments laid out in last week’s long blog post.

Guterres, as the titular leader of the climate movement’s center of globalist messaging, sees his perch under assault and responded with a rhetorical effort to reassert his authority. We can expect the secretary general to keep raging as his influence wanes and he is replaced by someone whose own words might fork some lightning.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.