Executive Pay for Federal Employees Has Increased $571 Million Since 2015

The Canada Flag flies on the Peace Tower of Parliament Hill as pedestrians make their way along Sparks Street Mall in Ottawa on Nov. 9, 2021. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Pay for executives working in the federal government increased over half a billion dollars in less than 10 years, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF).

Compensation for executives across federal departments and agencies increased from $1.38 billion in 2015 to $1.95 billion in 2022, an increase of 41 percent, according to a CTF federal commentary published Jan. 17, citing data obtained from access-to-information records.

The organization also found that, over that seven-year period, the number of federal executives increased 31 percent, from 7,138 to 9,371, while inflation, based on Statistics Canada data, increased 19.4 percent.

According to the compensation records, the average annual compensation among federal executives increased from $193,600 to $208,480 during that period.

In the CTF commentary, the organization’s federal director Franco Terrazzano said that taxpayers don’t need to pay for “more highly paid paper-pushers.”

“It’s a safe bet that most Canadians struggling with grocery bills, heating bills and mortgage payments aren’t losing sleep worrying that government executives aren’t paid enough, so why is the government ballooning its c-suite?” Mr. Terrazzano said.

It’s not just salaries that increased, CTF said, but the federal government also handed out $202 million in bonuses in 2022, with the average bonus of a federal executive being $18,252 that year. The CTF said the compensation records show that about 90 percent of federal executives get a bonus each year.

Since 2015, the government has handed out $1.3 billion in bonuses, with the annual cost to taxpayers increasing by 46 percent over that time, CTF said. It added that the feds gave out over 800,000 raises between 2020 and 2022.

“With the feds employing about 400,000 bureaucrats, that means multiple employees received more than one raise in recent years,” a CTF news release said.

“In the last couple years, taxpayers have paid for tens of thousands of new bureaucrats, hundreds of thousands of pay raises and hundreds of millions in bonuses, and we’re still getting poor performance from the bureaucracy,” Mr. Terrazzano said.

“Trudeau needs to take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy, and he should start by reining in the c-suite.”

CTF’s commentary came after an ADP Canada monthly Happiness@Work Index, released Dec. 27, 2023, revealed that 56 percent of Canadian workers were “less optimistic” about getting an increase in salary and compensation in 2024.

Lacklustre Performance

The c-suite salary increases fail to correspond to “years of underwhelming performance results” by federal departments and agencies, CTF said.

In 2022–23, government departments met just over half of the performance targets set for them, according to information from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.

CTF also pointed to a March 2023 report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) showing that each year from 2018–19 to 2021–22, federal departments met less than half of their performance targets.

On average, nearly 25 percent of targets are not met annually, 10 percent of targets don’t have available results, and another third have results to be achieved in the future, the PBO report said.

“Consequently, less than 50 percent of targets are consistently met within the same year,” the report said.

“Unfortunately, parliamentarians are often required to approve new spending without having viewed the departmental results,” the PBO wrote, noting that many departmental results are not shared in a timely manner.

“The lack of timely and comprehensive departmental plans and results data makes parliamentarians’ key role of scrutinizing proposed spending more difficult.”

Jennifer Cowan contributed to this report.