The federal government’s public service has expanded at double the pace of Canada’s population over the past decade, with the added weight on taxpayers estimated at roughly $7 billion this year alone, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF).
Between 2016 and 2026, the federal workforce swelled by 33 percent, reaching 345,282 employees more than twice the 15 percent population growth Canada recorded over the same period. Franco Terrazzano, the CTF’s federal director, argues the numbers tell a damning story about spending discipline in the nation’s capital.
“Taxpayers are still paying too much for too many paper pushers in Ottawa,” Terrazzano said. “Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to make the bureaucracy more affordable to provide meaningful tax relief and stop borrowing money.”
The Carney government has made some progress on that front. Ottawa trimmed its payroll by 3.5 percent between March 2025 and March 2026. But that rollback barely dents the decade-long expansion the federal workforce still carries 86,303 more employees than it did in 2016. With average full-time compensation for a federal worker projected at $161,900 in 2026, the financial stakes are significant. Terrazzano estimates that had Ottawa grown its workforce in step with population, taxpayers would be pocketing roughly $7 billion more this year.
The growth has not been evenly distributed. Seven federal departments and agencies more than doubled their staffing levels since 2016. Infrastructure Canada led the list with a staggering 376 percent increase in employees, followed by Women and Gender Equality Canada at 301 percent. The RCMP External Review Committee grew by 214 percent, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada by 174 percent, and Elections Canada by 154 percent. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada added 150 percent more staff, while the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada grew by 116 percent.
In raw numbers, Employment and Social Development Canada saw the largest single addition, bringing on 13,228 new workers a 59 percent increase over the decade. The Canada Revenue Agency added 9,290 employees, a 24 percent jump.
Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer projects that Ottawa will spend $79.4 billion on its bureaucracy this year, up sharply from a projected $69.2 billion the year before. The overall cost of the federal public service has climbed 80 percent between 2015 and 2024, according to CTF figures.
“The number of federal employees is shrinking a little bit, but Carney still has lots of work to do to shrink Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy,” Terrazzano said.
Public frustration with the situation appears to be mounting. A 2025 Leger poll found that a majority of Canadians support reducing the size of the federal government. Perhaps more telling, half of those surveyed said federal services have actually gotten worse since 2016 even as the government added tens of thousands of workers to deliver them.
The findings raise hard questions about what, exactly, taxpayers have received in return for a decade of bureaucratic expansion, and whether the Carney government’s modest cuts are enough to reverse a trend that has been building for years.
