Federal public service | 109,000 more civil servants under Trudeau

(Ottawa) Nearly 110,000 civil servants have been added to the workforce of departments and agencies since Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power in 2015, an increase of 42%. The use of consultants has also increased. However, the delivery of certain services still leaves something to be desired. And even if the ministries project a reduction in their workforce during their annual planning, it does not materialize.

After this sustained increase in the size of government, the Trudeau government announced in its most recent budget the abolition of 5,000 civil servant positions through attrition… while creating new programs that will require employees to administer them. An untenable situation, according to observers.

For the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, this small reduction in the size of government over four years aims to “demonstrate to Canadians who control their spending that we control our spending too.”

However, the 4.2 billion in savings that this measure should generate seem very little compared to the 44 billion in new expenses added since 2019. “There has been a very significant increase in the operating costs of the federal government,” notes in interviews economist Louis Lévesque, former Deputy Minister of International Trade and Transport. And they are “much higher than what we had expected before the pandemic”.

Indigenous Services, Immigration, Health… all these departments have “increased significantly”. And there are new initiatives like the daycare program, dental insurance and drug insurance.

After the Harper era

The coming to power of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015 coincides with an increase in the number of departments and agencies following cuts by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. The number of civil servants increased from almost 259,000 the following year to around 357,000 in 2023. And the size of government has grown further over the past year, reaching some 368,000 employees as of March 31, 2024, according to the latest federal budget document.

Treasury Board data includes all active employees, regardless of their length of employment – ​​even students are counted. The federal public service includes the central public administration and the separate agencies subject to the Public Financial Management Act. Excluded are regular members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Armed Forces, employees hired locally abroad to work in embassies and those of five organizations not included in the central payroll system¹.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, noted in 2023 that a large part of the increase in operating expenses was attributable to an increase in personnel expenses. These reached 56.5 billion in 2022-2023, according to its analysis. He was struck by “the continued and sustained increase in the size of the civil service”.

“I expected that at some point it would plateau,” he said in an interview.

Its figures differ from those of the Treasury Board because it includes all employees of the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP to obtain data more representative of the size of government and calculates the number of civil servants in full-time equivalent (FTE ). In its latest update, it estimates that the federal public service had 432,000 FTE employees in 2022-2023.

Although ministries project a decline each year in their planning, “the decline never materializes.”

“We tend to see an increase year after year, and the anticipated decline is always postponed over time,” he observes.

Increase in the Canadian population

However, we must not forget that the Canadian population has also increased significantly over the years, argues trade unionist Yvon Barrière. It increased from 35 million in 2015 to more than 40 million in 1^er January 2024.

“I think that the government apparatus has not grown as quickly as the Canadian population, especially since we were behind schedule because of the Conservative government’s massive cuts,” explains the man who is regional executive vice-president for Quebec of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) – the largest union of federal public servants with 240,000 members.

The Harper government eliminated 26,000 positions between 2011 and 2014. He believes that there was catching up to be done. However, the ratio has increased in recent years.

More consultants

The use of consultants has also increased steadily under the Liberals. Professional and special services reached “a record level of 21.6 billion” for the 2023-2024 financial year, underlines the Parliamentary Budget Officer in one of his reports.

“Increasing the use of consultants is understandable when we call on expertise that is not available within the public service,” he explains in an interview. What is more difficult to explain is that we are increasing the use of external expertise while significantly increasing the number of employees. »

Yves Giroux says he has not received a “very clear” response from the government on this question.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has promised to cut spending on consulting services if he forms a government. “We will get rid of this waste and we will bring work into the bureaucracy at a lower price for Canadians,” he told his caucus in January. The PSAC still fears cuts to the public service.

Increasing the number of civil servants and consultants does not necessarily mean better service delivery. For example, we can no longer count the number of people who end up calling on the media to unblock an application for a study permit or permanent residence after having come up against the machinery of the Ministry of Immigration, which is overwhelmed. .

“This is where we arrive at an observation which suggests that the size of the public service perhaps does not have a direct relationship with the capacity of organizations and ministries to achieve their own objectives,” notes Yves Giroux.

“There is perhaps also poor management in terms of staff allocation,” retorts Yvon Barrière. He gives the example of the passport crisis in 2022 where Service Canada employees, assigned to other tasks during the pandemic, were not all brought back to their initial positions in anticipation of the explosion in demand.

“We have often stuck with an image of people who don’t work a lot, but quite honestly, it’s quite the opposite,” underlines the trade unionist. We may not necessarily always have the necessary tools to excel, but people work very, very, very hard in the departments. »

^⁠1 Canadian Security Intelligence Service, National Capital Commission, Canada Investment and Savings, Canadian Forces Non-Public Fund, Security Intelligence Review Committee (prior to 2010).