FEATURE WINTER 2025 // Canadian Government Executive / 7 01 One, the size of government. A reckoning is coming. The federal government has grown more in the past ten years than in the previous ten. There are now over 367,000 public servants; over 100,000 more than when the current government took office – a 26 per cent increase. The highest growth rates occurred immediately during and after the COVID-19 pandemic as the federal government added positions to deal with the public health emergency and its aftermath. The figure below from the Montreal Economic Institute shows changes in the number of federal public servants from 1984 to 2023 by successive governments. The deepest reductions in the public service workforce occurred during the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during the years 1994 to 1999. The biggest increases in the public service workforce have occurred during the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, from 2015 onward. But as former Treasury Board Secretary, Graham Flack, makes clear in this issue’s feature interview, current public service growth was “exactly as required” to meet the political decisions of the elected government to pursue a very ambitious policy agenda. Government got bigger because it is doing more things. More public servants were needed to deliver what the government wanted to do. That this was a deliberate outcome of government policy can be seen in this second chart below from the Montreal Economic institute that compares the change in the number of federal public servants indexed against Canada’s total population. It shows that previous governments basically managed down the number of public servants over their tenure, some more significantly than others. Any government seeking to reduce the federal deficit will, by necessity, cut the size of the public service. Slower growth rates and allowing position attrition will be insufficient to restore a closer balance between population and public service. Eliminating positions will be necessary. A true reckoning on the size of government will require a hard look at what government does today. Trimming at the top of bureaucracy or the margins of programs will not yield more than a modest, temporary adjustment in growth similar to last year’s budget direction of 5,000 fewer public servants and $15 billion in overall savings across government operations. A deeper program and service review is required. A determination to stop doing some things will be the necessary catalyst for a rightsizing of government. Supporting that process with ideas and recommendations and then, successfully implementing such direction will challenge the public service for the first time in three decades. That was when the last serious program and service review was conducted by the Chretien government. With no corporate memory inside government as to how that was done, and little remaining from the smaller scale reductions under the previous Conservative government of Stephen Harper, the federal public service will need to ready itself for this eventuality Figure 1: Federal public service workforce 1984-2023 Figure 2: Change in the number of federal public servants
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