Like an untended lawn that’s become encased in unpleasant brush, the Canadian public service is overgrown. It needs a lot more than a couple of passes with a lawnmower — it needs a chainsaw, and only Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has the guts to wield it.
On Wednesday, the Tories set out clear benchmarks for the public service cleanup. The plan is to not replace employees when they leave, the party’s deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, told the National Post. Given that around 17,000 staff members end their service each year, that will reduce the size of the federal workforce by upwards of 68,000 positions over a four-year mandate.
It’s a good start to the great landscaping project that Poilievre will have if he wins the next election. Since the ascension of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the federal public service has grown by about 111,000 staff members — from about 257,000 during Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s last year in government, to roughly 368,000 in the 2023-24 fiscal year. That’s an increase of about 43 per cent. In the same period, the general population grew 15 per cent.
The painfully inflated bureaucracy is a huge cost to taxpayers. But it also threatens to block much-needed reforms. Nearly a third of the federal workforce was hired under Trudeau-government values, and have worked under the Trudeau government’s expectations. We can likely expect some reluctance to implement a new government’s desired changes, as appears to be the case in the United States.
After President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures within the U.S. government, some bureaucrats have been accused of trying to conceal DEI programs by couching them in different language. States that have banned DEI in universities face a similar challenges, with schools rebranding these initiatives instead of axing them.
Conservatives should brace for a resistant bureaucracy in Canada. Preparing for a workforce cull is one way to deal with it.
The majority — 60,000 — of Trudeau-era hires have gone to just six federal departments and agencies. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is one mega beneficiary, which saw its staff double (the feds now plan to cut 3,300 jobs back). The others are the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Employment and Social Development Canada, as well as the fisheries, defence and procurement departments.
Some of those hires might very well be justifiable. The CRA, for example, has notoriously struggled to do its job and perhaps needed a few more hands on deck: while peer countries were recovering owed taxes identified by the Panama Papers back in 2019, the Canadian taxman didn’t figure out that it was owed $76 million until 2022.
But pinning all the government’s faults on a lack of manpower alone would require every department to be running at perfect efficiency, which we all know isn’t happening. The immigration office is struggling with massive backlogs as it cobbles together anti-racism plans, while Employment and Social Development Canada now has more work to do in administering the Liberals’ new daycare and dental programs — and dreaming up new plans to expand federal diversity quotas.
Similar stories can no doubt be found in other departments that have curried favour with the current government. From 2021 to 2024, Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations grew from 8,742 employees to 10,725, an increase of 23 per cent. In 2015, these departments had just 4,684 staff members. The more-than-doubling of staff has no doubt contributed to the fact that, last year, the government spent double the amount on those two Indigenous portfolios than it did on national defence.
Other big spikes include: Infrastructure Canada’s headcount more than doubled from 2021 to 2024; from 2015 to 2024, the Privy Council Office saw its personnel numbers rise by 77 per cent; from 2017 to 2024, the Public Health Agency of Canada nearly doubled; the government IT department of Shared Services Canada has grown by 81 per cent since 2015; and Statistics Canada ballooned by 48 per cent.
The most extreme case of bloat could be found in the bowels of Women and Gender Equality Canada, which more than quadrupled its workforce under Trudeau, expanding to 443 employees in 2024, from 92 in 2015. Now that’s a department that could use the Javier Milei treatment.
Waste and over-extension are endemic to the current government, which is why some serious belt-tightening over the next few years shouldn’t be a problem. And it’s clear that even Trudeau, the public-sector cheerleader that he is, doesn’t think his current employees can do the work: every year, his spending on private consulting firms rises by another billion or so, reaching $15 billion in 2023.
You’d think that having vastly overpopulated offices would at least alleviate the need to run to McKinsey & Company for help every step of the way, but we’ve received no such blessing. Liberal ministers are notoriously disinterested in actually governing, and that is reflected in the government they’ve created.
Under Poilievre, and his plan to cut down on his future workforce, many public servants will stomp their feet in anger at the prospect of having their numbers reduced. Conservatives mustn’t be deterred. When gardens go fallow, it takes a lot of weed-whacking to restore them to their proper glory.