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Generous Justin: Trudeau hands out one million raises in four years

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Ryan Thorpe

The Trudeau government rubberstamped more than one million pay raises to federal bureaucrats since 2020, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

The federal government gave 319,067 bureaucrats a raise in 2023. The government has consistently declined to disclose how much annual pay raises cost taxpayers.

“Taxpayers deserve to know how much all these raises are costing us,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “It’s wrong for the government to hand out a million raises while taxpayers lost their jobs or struggled to afford ground beef and rent.”

The cost of the federal payroll hit $67 billion last year, a record high, representing a 68 per cent increase since 2016.

Meanwhile, the size of the bureaucracy spiked by about 40 per cent since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office, with more than 98,000 new employees being added to the federal payroll.

In 2020, the federal government issued 373,134 pay raises to bureaucrats, followed by 266,646 in 2021 and 162,263 in 2022.

All told, the feds rubberstamped 1,121,110 pay raises since the beginning of 2020.

“What extra value have taxpayers received from the million raises Trudeau has given bureaucrats?” Terrazzano said. “You shouldn’t get a raise just because you show up to work twice a week with your shoes tied.”

The raises come on top of lavish bonuses for federal bureaucrats. The government rubberstamped $406 million in bonuses in 2023 alone.

Bureaucrats working in federal departments and agencies took home $210 million in bonuses last year, while bureaucrats working in federal Crown corporations took $195 million in bonuses.

The government dished out more than $1.5 billion in bonuses to employees in federal departments since 2015, despite the fact that “less than 50 per cent of [performance] targets are consistently met within the same year,” according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The average compensation for each full-time federal employee is $125,300 when pay, pension, paid time off, shift premiums and other benefits are considered, according to the PBO.

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

Government employees also receive an “8.5 per cent wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts,” according to a report from the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan think tank.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union representing federal bureaucrats, is currently fighting against a government order asking employees return to the office three days per week.

Alex Silas, PSAC’s regional executive vice-president for the National Capital Region, said bureaucrats were “infuriated” by the government asking them to show up to their jobs in person three days per week.

“Taxpayers have zero sympathy for overpaid bureaucrats throwing a hissy fit about having to swap out their sweatpants for suits,” Terrazzano said. “Taxpayers are the ones who should be complaining after the feds hired tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, paid out hundreds of thousands of raises and hundreds of millions in bonuses and still can’t deliver good services.

“Trudeau needs to take some air out of his ballooning bloated bureaucracy.”

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Energy

Global fossil fuel use rising despite UN proclamations

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From the Fraser Institute

By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari

Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades… the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

At the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, last week called for a global net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, which requires a “fossil fuel phase-out” and “deep decarbonization across the entire value chain.”

Yet despite the trillions of dollars already spent globally pursuing this target—and the additional trillions projected as necessary to “end the era of fossil fuels”—the world’s dependence on fossil fuels has remained largely unchanged.

So, how realistic is a “net-zero” emissions world—which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting carbon emissions with activities such as planting trees—by 2050?

The journey began in 1995 when the UN hosted the first COP conference in Berlin, launching a global effort to drive energy transition and decarbonization. That year, global investment in renewable energy reached US$7 billion, according to some estimates. Since then, an extraordinary amount of money and resources have been allocated to the transition away from fossil fuels.

According to the International Energy Agency, between 2015 and 2023 alone, governments and industry worldwide spent US$12.3 trillion (inflation-adjusted) on clean energy. For context, that’s over six times the value of the entire Canadian economy in 2023.

Despite this spending, between 1995 and 2023, global fossil fuel consumption increased by 62 per cent, with oil consumption rising by 38 per cent, coal by 66 per cent and natural gas by 90 per cent.

And during that same 28-year period, despite the trillions spent on energy alternatives, the share of global energy provided by fossil fuels declined by only four percentage points, from 85.6 per cent to 81.5 per cent.

This should come as no surprise. Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades. According to a recent study by renowned scholar Vaclav Smil, the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

Moreover, coal only surpassed wood as the main energy source worldwide around 1900. It took more than 150 years from oil’s first commercial extraction for oil to reach 25 per cent of all fossil fuels consumed worldwide. Natural gas didn’t reach this threshold until the end of the 20th century, after 130 years of industry development.

Now, consider the current push by governments to force an energy transition via regulation and spending. In Canada, the Trudeau government has set a target to fully decarbonize electricity generation by 2035 so all electricity is derived from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. But merely replacing Canada’s existing fossil fuel-based electricity with clean energy sources within the next decade would require building the equivalent of 23 major hydro projects (like British Columbia’s Site C) or 2.3 large-scale nuclear power plants (like Ontario’s Bruce Power). The planning and construction of significant electricity generation infrastructure in Canada is a complex and time-consuming process, often plagued by delays, regulatory hurdles and substantial cost overruns.

The Site C project took around 43 years from initial feasibility studies in 1971 to securing environmental certification in 2014. Construction began on the Peace River in northern B.C. in 2015, with completion expected in 2025 at a cost of at least $16 billion. Similarly, Ontario’s Bruce Power plant took nearly two decades to complete, with billions in cost overruns. Given these immense practical, financial and regulatory challenges, achieving the government’s 2035 target is highly improbable.

As politicians gather at high-profile conferences and set ambitious targets for a swift energy transition, global reliance on fossil fuels has continued to increase. As things stand, achieving net-zero by 2050 appears neither realistic nor feasible.

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Business

UN climate conference—it’s all about money

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From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.

Every year, the United Nations convenes a Conferences of Parties to set the world’s agenda to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s the biggest event of the year for the climate industry. This year’s conference (COP29), which ends on Sunday, drew an army of government officials, NGOs, celebrities and journalists (many flying on GHG-emitting jet aircraft) to Baku, Azerbaijan.

The COP follows a similar narrative every year. It opens with a set of ambitious goals for climate policies, followed by days of negotiating as countries jockey to carve out agreements that most favour their goals. In the last two days, they invariably reach a sticking point when it appears the countries might fail to reach agreement. But they burn some midnight oil, some charismatic actors intervene (in the past, this included people such as Al Gore), and with great drama, an agreement is struck in time for the most important event of the year, flying off to their protracted winter holidays.

This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.

Some of these agenda items are actually improvements over previous COPs. For example, they’re actually talking about “climate adaptation”—the unwanted stepchild of climate policies—more this year. But as usual, money remains a number one priority. As reported in the Associated Press, “negotiators are working on a new amount of cash for developing nations to transition to clean energy, adapt to climate change and deal with weather disasters. It’ll replace the current goal of $100 billion (USD) annually—a goal set in 2009.” Moreover, “experts” claim the world needs between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion (yes, trillion) in “climate finance” annually. Not to be outdone, according to an article in the Euro News, other experts want $9 trillion per year by 2030. Clearly, the global edifice that is climate change activism is all about the money.

Reportedly, COP29 is in its final section of the meta-narrative, with much shouting over getting to a final agreement. One headline in Voice of America reads “Slow progress on climate finance fuels anger as COP29 winds down.” And Argus News says “climate finance talks to halt, parties fail to cut options.” We only await the flying in of this year’s crop of climate megafauna to seal the deal.

This year’s conference in Baku shows more clearly than ever before that the real goal of the global climate cognoscenti is a giant wealth transfer from developed to developing countries. Previous climate conferences, whatever their faults, focused more on setting emission reduction targets and timelines and less about how the UN can extract more money from developed countries. The final conflict of COP29 isn’t about advancing clean energy targets or helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change technologically, it’s all about show me the money.

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