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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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2025 Federal Election

Poilievre promises to drop ‘radical political ideologies’ in universities

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has pledged to prioritize funding scientific research over ‘radical political ideologies’ at Canadian universities.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has promised to scrap government funding of “radical political ideologies” in higher education if elected prime minister.

During an April 2 speech in Toronto, Poilievre told a French reporter that his Conservative government will focus on promoting scientific research rather than furthering radical ideologies in Canadian universities.

“The money we spend on research will go to research, not to promoting political ideologies,” Poilievre said. “We want, for example, our science and technology research to go into technological breakthroughs, inventions, innovations, discoveries, cures for terrible diseases that can improve Canadian lives.”

“That is what Canadians expect their tax dollars to go to, not to spend it on radical political ideologies that are first of all completely out of touch with the values of Canadians, and second of all, have no scientific value to our people,” Poilievre added.

This was the second time Poilievre denounced woke spending at universities, the first time being at a Quebec rally last week.

The policy proposal has seemed to draw the ire of some in academia, with Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) executive director David Robinson stating, “It’s worrying that a leader of a political party in Canada would try to dictate how research funds will be granted.”

“We’ve seen the impact of this political meddling south of the border where the Trump administration has launched a full-scale assault on universities and the scientific community,” he continued. “This kind of American-style culture war has no place in Canada.”

Under U.S. President Donald Trump, public schools and universities were given until the end of February to eliminate their DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs or risk losing federal funding.

More than 30 states have introduced legislation that would eliminate DEI programs from education as part of a broader push against woke ideology spearheaded by Republicans such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

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2025 Federal Election

Will Four More Years Of Liberals Prove The West’s Tipping Point?

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The 1997 political comedy Wag The Dog featured a ruling president far behind in the polls engaging Hollywood to rescue his failing ratings. By inventing a fake war against Albania and a left-behind “hero”— nicknamed Shoe— the Hollywood producer creates a narrative that sweeps the nation.

The meme of hanging old shoes from the branches of trees and power lines catches on and re-elects the president. In a plot kicker, the vain producer is killed by the president’s handlers when he refuses to stay quiet about his handiwork. The movie’s cynicism over political spin made it a big hit in the Bill Clinton/ Monica Lewinsky days.

In the recent 2024 election the Democrats thought they’d resurrect the WTD formula to spin off senile Joe Biden at the last minute in favour of Kamala Harris. Americans saw through the obvious charade and installed Donald Trump instead.

You’d think that would be enough to dissuade Canadians who pride themselves on their hip, postmodern humour. But you’d be wrong, they don’t get the joke. Wag The Carney is the current political theatre as Liberals bury the reviled Justin Trudeau and pivot to Mark Carney. If you believe the polling it might just be working on a public besotted by ex-pat Mike Myers and “Canada’s Not For Sale”.

As opposed to Wag The Dog, few are laughing about this performative theatre, however. There are still two debates (English/ French)  and over three more weeks of campaign where anything— hello Paul Chiang—can happen. But with Laurentian media bribed by the Libs— Carney is threatening those who stray— people are already projecting what another four years of Liberals in office will mean.

As the most prominent outlier to Team Canada’s “we will fight them on the beaches…” Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith is already steering a course for her province that doesn’t include going to war with America on energy. She asked Trump to delay his tariffs until Canadians had a chance to speak on the subject in an election April 28. Naturally the howler monkeys of the Left accused her of treason. She got her wish Wednesday when Canada was spared any new tariffs for the time being.

Clearly, she (and Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe) have no illusions about Carney not using their energy industry as a whipping post for his EU climate schemes. They’ve seen the cynical flip in polls as former Trudeau loyalists hurry back to the same Liberal party they abandoned in 2024. They know Carney can manipulate the Boomer demographic just as he did when he called for draconian financial methods against the peaceful Truckers Convoy in 2022.

Former Reform leader Preston Manning is unequivocal: “’Large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government, no matter who leads it.’“ So how does the West respond within Confederation to protect itself from a predatory Ottawa elite?

Clearly, the emissions cap— part of Carney’s radical environmental plans— will keep Alberta’s treasure in the ground. With Carney repeating no cancellation of Bill C-69 that precludes building pipelines in the future, the momentum for a referendum in Alberta will only grow. The NDP will howl, but there will be enough push among from the rest of Albertans for a new approach within Canada.

In this vein Smith even wants to approach Quebec. While it seems like odd bedfellows the two provinces most at odds with the status quo have much in common .  “This is an area where our two provinces may be able to coordinate an approach,” Smith wrote this week. That could include referendums by the middle of 2026.

Perhaps the best recipe for keeping the increasingly fractious union together is a devolution of power, not unlike that governing the United Kingdom. While Westminster remains the central power since 1997, there are now separate parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that put power closer to the citizen, so that local factors are better recognized in decision making.

With so little uniting the regions of the country any longer, devolution might provide a solution. What form could decentralization take within Canada? A Western Canada Parliament could blunt predatory federal energy policies while countering the imbalances of Canada’s equalization process. Similar parliaments representing Quebec, the Atlantic provinces, Ontario and B.C. would protect their own special interests within Canada. Ottawa could handle Canada’s international obligations to defence, trade and international cooperation.

While the idea is fraught with pitfalls it nonetheless remains preferable to a breakup of the nation, which four more years of Liberals rule under Mark Carney and the same Trudeau characters will likely precipitate. Smith’s outreach case would be the beginning of such a process.

None of this would be necessary were the populations of Eastern Canada and B.C.’s lower mainland remotely serious after snoozing through the Trudeau decade. The OECD shows Canada’s 1.4% GDP barely ahead of Luxembourg and behind the rest of the industrialized world from 2015-2025. As we’ve said before the Boomers sitting on their $1 million-plus homes are re-staging Woodstock on the Canada Pension and OAS. As with Wag The Dog, they’re not getting the joke.

When the Boomers award themselves another four years of taxapalooza and Mike Myers and the other “Canada Not For For Sale” celebs head south to their tax-avoidance schemes how will the Boomers say they’ve left Canada  better off for anyone under 60? We’ll hang up and listen to your answer on the TV.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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