Apr 14, 2024 - 08:29
By cbc.ca

The federal government under Trudeau is bigger — but not as big as it used to be

Earlier this year, the Public Service Commission of Canada reported that the size of the federal public service had reached a record new high. According to Treasury Board Secretariat data, Ottawa employed 357,247 public servants in 2023.

That also marked a significant increase over where the public service stood when Justin Trudeau's government came to office in 2015. At the time, TBS said the federal public service employed 257,034 people.

But something else reached a record size in 2023 — Canada itself. And to account for the fact that the country the federal government serves is always growing, it might make more sense to measure the size of the public service as a share of the total population.

The federal public service represented 0.90 per cent of the Canadian population in 2023. That's still larger than its share of the population in 2015 (0.72 per cent). But it's not a record.

According to data from the TBS that goes back to 1980, the federal public service's share of the population peaked at 0.99 per cent in 1983 and 1984. That figure began to fall thereafter, but it was still at or above 0.90 per cent in every year from 1980 to 1992.

On the eve of the Liberal government's eighth budget, and with the size and shape of the federal government becoming a focus of political debate, it's worth taking stock of what has changed during the Trudeau era in Ottawa — and placing it in its historical context.

And on a few broad measures, the trend is similar to what the data on the public service indicates. Under Trudeau, the federal government is bigger than it was in 2015. But it's still not as big as it used to be.