Under Trudeau, the civil service has grown twice as fast as Canada’s population

globalnews.ca:

data just published by the federal Treasury Board. On March 31, 2015, the last full fiscal year that the Harper Conservatives were in power, the civil service population was 257,034.

That’s an average annual growth rate of more than 3.6 per cent per year or double Canada’s average annual population growth in the same period of about 1.6 per cent.The civil service grew by more than six per cent in both 2021 and 2023. By comparison, the size of the civil service shrank in each of the last five years the Harper Conservatives were in power.“To deliver the essential services on which Canadians rely, the public service adjusts its size according to government priorities and program requirements, with deputy heads ensuring workforce alignment with mandates,” Treasury Board President Anita Anand said in an email statement.A TBS spokesperson said the government has committed to finding savings of $4.2 billion over the next four years and those savings will include the elimination of about 5,000 public service jobs over four years by attrition.That said: neither Anand nor any other minister queried by Global News could provide specifics about what all those extra bureaucrats actually do to maintain or improve quality of service delivery.For example, the bureaucracy that serves the prime minister has grown dramatically during the Trudeau years.

That bureaucracy, known as the Privy Council Office, has 1,288 employees in 2024, an increase of 561 people or 77 per cent compared to the 727 PCO employees in 2015. And yet, when asked to explain why his office needed so many more employees, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not answer, instead directing queries to the bureaucrats in the PCO.PCO bureaucrats did not