COLUMN: On Parliament Hill – The danger of big government

Last week, I began a series of articles on the growth on Canada’s bureaucracy. How big government presents a danger not only to our economy but also to personal freedoms and democracy itself.

The term bureaucracy itself originated in France in the 18th century. It combines the French word bureau – ‘desk’ or ‘office’ – with the Greek word κράτος (kratos) – ‘rule’ or ‘political power’.

Political power indeed.

That is essentially what bureaucracy is: A government behind the government.

In the Canadian context, the bureaucracy forms a permanent government behind the transitional (elected) government.

To put this in perspective, at the federal level, Canadians elect 338 Members of Parliament. But the federal government is made up of nearly 368,000 members of the public service. The ratio of federal bureaucrats to elected officials, representing the people, is 1,088 to one.

In a democracy, where people (are led to believe they) have a say in how they are governed and by whom, this is particularly troubling. Elected governments come and go but the functioning government (the bureaucracy) remains in place—and under Justin Trudeau, it just continues to grow, in size, cost, and power.

I wrote last week how, under Trudeau, the federal public service has grown by more than 40 percent in less than nine years. Trudeau has added nearly 100,000 bureaucrats.

The public service has grown by 40 percent but during the same period, Canada’s population has grown by only 14 percent.

For what?

Are you getting better service for your ever-increasing tax bill?

It was Oscar Wilde who wrote, “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” This certainly seems to be the case in Canada.

As the authors of a 2023 Fraser Institute study put it plainly, “the one big growth industry of the Trudeau years—the bureaucracy.”

Some Canadian departments are also staffed exponentially higher than their counterparts in other countries.

For example, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has 40,000 employees. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has 78,000 employees, but the U.S. has 10 times our population. While part of this is the result of our bizarre and overly complicated tax code—a problem Conservatives are already making concrete plans to fix—it is also clearly the result of poor management, a lack of service metrics, and a lack of efficiency.

According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), adding 100,000 employees to the government payroll has pushed the cost of the federal payroll to a whopping $67.4 billion per year—a 68 percent increase since 2016.

That’s more than we spend annually on our military.

More than the federal government pays annually for healthcare.

That number does not include the $22 billion the Liberals are spending on outside consultants.

Despite the massive increase in and expense of new staff and outside contractors, less than 50 percent of the government’s own performance targets are being met each year.

Imagine a business that hired 100,000 new employees, gave them wages and benefits 8.5 percent higher than the national average salary, then watched without concern as, despite working longer hours, they achieved empirically less in sales and service than the company had done when they had 100,000 fewer employees. It would be laughable if it weren’t so troubling—and our money.

Tune in next week for Part 3 of this series.