Canada’s Federal Public Service Works — and Isn’t Bloated or Unsustainable

Don’t fall for right wing talking points.

Far from being the lumbering, overgrown bureaucracy portrayed by right-wing commentators, Canada’s federal public service is effective, efficient, and reasonably sized. The last few years alone offer ample evidence: it implemented a range of major government initiatives with remarkable speed, all while adapting to new working conditions during the pandemic. There is little basis for the scare-mongering claim that the public service has become unsustainable, risking the financial well-being of the country.

Facing widespread dissatisfaction over their failure to effectively address cost-of-living pressures and the housing crisis since 2015, the Liberals have reached for a familiar tactic: making the government’s own workers pay for crises they did not create.

To justify major job cuts, Carney has framed recent public service growth as excessive, telling an Ottawa audience recently that it “can’t be sustained.” Yet instead of moderating the rate of growth, he’s shrinking the public service outright.

After promising to cap, not cut the public service during the 2025 election campaign as well as the Speech from the Throne, Carney’s first budget seeks to eliminate 28,000 federal jobs by 2028-29. The reversal—delivered by the MP for Nepean, home to thousands of federal workers—feels not only abrupt, but contemptuous.

Why the public service grew: because it does more

Canada’s federal public service employed 357,965 workers in 2025, representing 0.86% of the population. A decade earlier, that figure was 0.72%. Yes, it’s proportionally larger—but hardly unprecedented. In 1990 it was 0.91%. In 1983 it was 0.99%.

Comparisons with several EU countries that, like Canada, provide strong social programs to their citizens make the point even clearer. In 2023, central government employees as a share of population were:

• Norway: 3.2%

• France: 2.9%

• Sweden: 2.7%

• Austria: 1.6%

• Finland: 1.4%

• Canada: 0.9% (0.86% in 2025)

Canada’s federal workforce is on the smaller side relative to its peers.

(The high outlying figure for Norway is the result of the national government playing a bigger role in health care. And of course, each country has a different mix of functions assigned to the central, national-level administration—no comparison is perfect.)

A government that took on more, not less

The growth since 2015 reflects one simple fact: Ottawa has been doing more—much more. Here are just some of the new initiatives the federal public service delivered over the last few years:

• massive, multifaceted and unprecedented pandemic response (2020 onward)

• national child care plan (2021)

• national dental care plan (2022–23)

• pharmacare (2024, now partially stalled by Carney)

• national school food program (2024)

• national disability benefit (2025)

• processing of record-high immigration flows; this included large numbers of refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan while the overall total of newcomers peaked at 484,135 in 2024

• a range of climate-focused programs

• various new initiatives in support of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples

Any honest analysis must start with this reality. Yet right-wing commentators often simply ignore it. They suggest that the public service grew for no good reason—and that regardless of size, it’s inefficient and worthy of pruning.

The right-wing narrative (and its fumbles)

Some arguments are embarrassingly weak. Winnipeg Free Press columnist Kevin Klein claimed earlier this year that “[b]ureaucracy is breaking Canada,” and that “the CRA is nearly double the size of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.”

Except that it isn’t. The CRA has around 60,000 workers; the IRS had 103,000 at the beginning of 2025 and around 76,000 even after Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed it. And unlike the IRS, the CRA administers both federal and provincial income taxes (except in Quebec), plus GST/HST. The United States does not have a federal sales tax at all.

Other critiques are seemingly more sophisticated, such as Stephen Tapp’s report for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), “The Growing Government Gap.” Released just days before Carney delivered his austerity budget, the report claims that “[g]overnment workers were less productive, on average, than business-sector employees.” Soon after, MLI hosted a panel discussion to promote the report that questioned whether Canada’s government is “too big”, while one of the organization’s directors noted that “government has gotten bigger…it doesn’t feel like the output of government has gotten bigger.”

This line of attack is premised on the idea that government productivity can be meaningfully measured. But how does one quantify in dollar terms the productivity of pandemic preparedness, disaster relief, food safety inspections, or diplomatic relationships?

Even more telling, however, is that Tapp’s own questionable figures show that federal productivity as a whole has been steady for a decade, sharply contradicting the framing advanced by MLI. The decline in the government sector he points to comes from provincial and municipal governments—not the federal government (see Table 3, p. 25)—though this doesn’t prevent MLI from using Tapp’s report to push the view that the federal public service ought to be trimmed.

Canada’s public service ranks among the world’s best

A more credible measure of government performance and effectiveness comes from Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Its Index of Public Administration, covering 120 countries, ranked Canada third in the world in 2024—behind only Singapore and Norway.

This builds on the School’s earlier International Civil Service Effectiveness Index, where Canada placed first in 2017 and third in 2019.

These rankings were compiled during the very years when the public service expanded. Growth did not undermine performance; it supported it. But you won’t hear MLI or other right wing think tanks showing the public service any appreciation for this international recognition.

Taken as a whole, Canada’s federal public service benefits from key features of our governance model and society. These include: ministerial accountability, parliamentary oversight, stable financing, access-to-information, media scrutiny, rule of law, merit-based hiring, and strong union activism. Imperfect features, yes—and some under serious threat. But collectively, they still produce a public service that performs at the top of the global class.

None of this is to detract from the need for continuous improvement in the public service. This is especially the case with respect to Indigenous Services Canada, which, as the Auditor General reported recently, is making inadequate progress in improving critical First Nations programs despite increased funding and hiring. And, of course, the disastrous Phoenix pay system—initiated and primarily implemented under the Harper Conservatives—remains a major stain, though one that involved private-sector contractors from IBM at least as much as the federal bureaucracy. (Of note, some of the additional staffing triggered by the Phoenix pay disaster is still reflected in today’s public service numbers—not because the bureaucracy is “bloated”, but because the system that failed has never been fully fixed or replaced. Some of what critics call excess is in fact the ongoing human cost of a failed, privately-contracted payroll experiment that continues to haunt public service workers.)

The real reason for Carney’s cuts

The public service has not become unsustainable. It has delivered major national programs. It performs at a high level relative to international peers. So why shrink it? Especially with struggling call centres at the CRA, 50-year immigration wait times (yes, you read that right), lengthy approvals for new drugs, and a persistent Phoenix pay system backlog. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

The answer lies in Carney’s hawkish turn. During the 2025 campaign, Carney pledged to reach NATO’s 2% military spending target by 2030. But within two months of forming government, he accelerated it dramatically: Canada would now hit 2% within a year, and then surge to 5% of GDP by 2035.

This year alone, military spending is up $9.3 billion. By 2035—under a conservative scenario in which GDP reaches $3.8 trillion—Canada would spend nearly $190 billion on the military. That’s six times the national defence budget in 2024–25.

This is not belt-tightening. It’s a radical pivot that won’t make us any safer.

Right-wing think tanks funded by private interests are delighted, of course. A future Canadian military-industrial complex—vast, lucrative, and taxpayer-funded—is their dream scenario. And public service layoffs, along with freezes to programs like pharmacare, are simply the collateral damage needed to make that sordid dream possible.

The public service is not the problem—Carney’s priorities are

Canada does not suffer from a bloated federal workforce. It suffers from an elite political class unwilling to defend and strengthen the programs the public most needs, and that form a core part of Canadian identity.

The public service grew because Canadians demanded action: on child care, on dental care, on pharmacare, on disability supports, on pandemic relief, on Indigenous reconciliation. Public service workers delivered at a scale unmatched in recent Canadian history, even if much work remains. For this, they are now being punished.

What Carney calls “unsustainable” is not the size of the federal public service. What is unsustainable is a government that guts the workforce needed to run and improve the programs and services the public depends on; a government that replaces a civilian public administration with unprecedented military expansion; a government that embraces talking points generated by right wing corporate-funded think tanks.

Canadians should not pretend that firing public service workers will somehow strengthen the country. A high-performing public service is not a luxury. It is the backbone of a stable, functioning democracy. The real risk is not a public service that is too large, but one that is too weak and hollowed-out to meet the challenges ahead.