Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

Economy

Trudeau balloons bureaucracy by 42 per cent, adds 108,000 employees

Published

4 minute read

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Franco Terrazzano 

The Trudeau government’s addiction to hiring bureaucrats continues unabated.

The government added another 10,525 bureaucrats to its payroll last year, bringing the size of the federal bureaucracy up to 367,772, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat released July 11.

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

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, the feds have added 108,793 new bureaucrats to the government dole – an increase of 42 per cent.

Canada’s population grew by just 14 per cent during the same time period. Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal employees today.

Table: Size of federal bureaucracy, per TBS data

Year (As of March 31)

Number of federal bureaucrats

2016

258,979

2017

262,696

2018

273,571

2019

287,983

2020

300,450

2021

319,601

2022

335,957

2023

357,247

2024

367,772

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

The cost of the federal payroll hit $67.4 billion in 2023, a record high, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Ottawa’s independent, non-partisan budget watchdog.

That’s a 68 per cent increase over 2016, when the federal payroll sat at 40.2 billion.

The Trudeau government also handed out more than one million pay raises to bureaucrats over the past four years alone, according to government records obtained by the CTF.

The government has consistently declined to reveal how much those raises cost taxpayers.

The federal government also rubberstamped more than $1.5 billion in bonuses for bureaucrats since 2015.

Meanwhile, despite the bureaucratic hiring spree, spending on consultants has also skyrocketed under the Trudeau government. Consultant spending now sits at $21.6 billion annually.

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

“We’ve seen an increase in the number of public servants and in public expenditures, but year after year, despite the fact that departments choose their performance indicators and the targets, they don’t seem to be getting significantly better at reaching them,” Budget Officer Yves Giroux testified to a parliamentary committee in March 2024.

The average annual compensation for full-time federal bureaucrats 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 less than $70,000 in 2023.

“The feds have hired tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, handed out more than one million raises and rubber stamped hundreds of million in bonuses in recent years and still can’t deliver good services,” Terrazzano said. “Any government that cares about balancing the budget must take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”

Business

Trudeau’s new tax package gets almost everything wrong

Published on

From the Fraser Institute

By Ben Eisen and Jake Fuss

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced several short-term initiatives related to tax policy. Most notably, the package includes a two-month GST holiday on certain items and a one-time $250 cheque that will be sent to all Canadians with incomes under $150,000.

Unfortunately, the Trudeau government’s package is a grab bag of bad ideas that will not do anything to get Canada out of the long-term growth rut in which our economy is mired. There are too many to list all in one place, but here are four of the biggest problems with Prime Minister Trudeau’s tax plan.

  1. It reduces the wrong taxes. When it comes to economic growth, not all taxes are created equal. Some cause far more economic harm per dollar of government revenue raised than others. The government’s package creates a holiday on the GST for some items (only for two months) which is a mistake given that the GST is one of the least economically harmful components of the tax mix. Canada’s recent growth record is abysmal, and boosting growth should be a primary goal of any changes to tax policy. A GST cut of any duration fails this test relative to other tax cuts.
  2. Temporary tax holidays shift consumption in time, they don’t boost growth. The government’s GST reduction is actually a short-term tax holiday on certain items that will last two months. There are decades worth of economic research showing that when governments create short-term tax breaks, they may change the timing of consumption, but they won’t contribute to actual economic growth. Shifting consumption from the future to the present won’t help get Canada out of the economic doldrums. This is particularly true of the Trudeau tax holiday since purchases that Canadians may have made after the two-month holiday period will simply be shifted forward to take advantage of the absence of the GST. As noted above, there are better taxes to cut than the GST, but no matter what taxes we are talking about permanent reductions are vastly superior to temporary tax cuts like short-term holidays.
  3. One-time tax rebates don’t improve economic incentives. Perhaps the worst element of the Trudeau government’s announcement was a plan to send $250 cheques to all Canadians earning under $150,000. One-time tax rebates are a terrible way to provide tax relief. When you cut income tax rates, you improve incentives for people to work and invest because they get to keep a larger share of their earnings. This helps the economy grow. One-time rebates that you get regardless of the economic choices you make has no similar effect. This means that the rebate with its $4.7 billion price tag won’t help Canada’s poor growth performance.
  4. It borrows from the future to give to the present. The federal government is currently running a large deficit. This raises the question of who will have to pay the $4.7 billion bill for the one-time payments announced today. The answer is that the government will have to borrow the money and therefore future taxpayers will have to either pay it off or service the extra debt indefinitely. The money the Trudeau government will send out won’t come out of thin air, it’ll have to be borrowed with the burden falling on future taxpayers.

The Trudeau government got one thing conceptually right, which is that there are advantages to reducing the tax burden on Canadians. Unfortunately, the policy package it has put forward to provide tax relief gets everything wrong. It reduces the wrong taxes, shifts taxes temporally rather than cutting them, does nothing to improve economic incentives, and burdens future taxpayers. With the holiday season around the corner, this attempt at a gift to Canadian taxpayers is the economic equivalent of a lump of coal in the stocking.

Continue Reading

Business

Carbon tax bureaucracy costs taxpayers $800 million

Published on

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Ryan Thorpe

The cost of administering the federal carbon tax and rebate scheme has risen to $283 million since it was imposed in 2019, according to government records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

By 2030, the cost of administering the carbon tax is expected to total $796 million, according to the records.

“Not only does the carbon tax make our gas, heating and groceries more expensive, but taxpayers are also hit with a big bill to fund Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s battalion of carbon tax bureaucrats,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Trudeau should make life more affordable and slash the cost of the bureaucracy by scrapping the carbon tax.”

The government records were released in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP John Barlow (Foothills).

The carbon tax and rebate scheme cost taxpayers $84 million in 2023, according to the records.

There were 461 federal bureaucrats tasked with administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme last year, according to the records.

The CTF previously reported administering the carbon tax cost taxpayers $199 million between 2019 and 2022.

Projected costs for administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme between 2024 and 2030 are $513 million, according to the records.

That would bring total administration costs for the carbon tax and rebate scheme up to $796 million by 2030.

But the true hit to taxpayers is even higher, as the records do not include costs associated with the Fuel Charge Tax Credit for Farmers or the Canada Carbon Rebate for Small Businesses.

“It’s magic math to believe the feds can raise taxes, skim hundreds-of-millions off the top to hire hundreds of new bureaucrats and then somehow make everyone better off with rebates,” Terrazzano said.

The carbon tax will cost the average household up to $399 this year more than the rebates, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government’s independent, non-partisan budget watchdog.

The PBO also notes that, “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change.”

The government also charges its GST on top of the carbon tax. The PBO report shows this carbon tax-on-tax will cost taxpayers $400 million this year. That money isn’t rebated back to Canadians.

The carbon tax currently costs 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.

By 2030, the carbon tax will cost 37 cents per litre of gasoline, 45 cents per litre of diesel and 32 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.

Continue Reading

Trending

X