The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a new report, Projecting Federal Personnel Expenses, that estimates federal personnel spending at $71.1 billion in 2024–25 and it’s not slowing down. The PBO projects federal personnel costs will hit $76.2 billion by 2029–30, adding $8.5 billion to the deficit in the process. The average bureaucrat, measured as a full-time equivalent (FTE), will cost taxpayers more than $172,000 a year by the end of the decade.

The report highlights a stunning trend: 87% of federal staff will soon be indeterminate permanent employees. Once hired, they’re almost impossible to fire. That’s the highest share since 2015.

The total workforce, measured in FTEs, is expected to climb to nearly 442,000 by 2030. To put it bluntly, that’s a city the size of Halifax on the federal payroll funded entirely by taxpayers who don’t enjoy the same gold-plated pensions and job security.

How We Got Here

The PBO says the growth comes from two things:

More employees, particularly permanent hires.

Let’s just look at the numbers, because they’re not vague. According to the Treasury Board Secretariat, the number of indeterminate federal employees that means permanent was 219,668 in 2015. Today, in 2025, it’s 306,872. That’s 87,204 new permanent jobs in ten years. A 40% increase.

And these aren’t seasonal hires or summer students. These are the policy analysts, the IT staff, the clerks, the communications officers. The people who make up the day-to-day machine of government. Once you’re in, you’re in. Indeterminate means almost impossible to fire.

Now put that in context. The total federal public service headcount all categories, not just permanent was 282,980 in 2010. By 2024, it was 367,772. That’s a 30% increase overall. But notice the difference: indeterminate jobs grew even faster than the public service as a whole. In other words, the growth has been concentrated in the most secure, most expensive category. The permanent class.

A 2023 demographic snapshot makes the trend undeniable: the public service grew 26.2% between 2010 and 2023. Yet permanent positions grew 40% between 2015 and 2025. That’s the story. The bureaucracy isn’t just getting bigger. It’s getting more entrenched. More locked in. Harder to shrink, harder to control, harder to hold accountable.

So the question is obvious: why does Ottawa need nearly 90,000 more permanent bureaucrats in a single decade? What exactly are they doing that couldn’t be done by the people already there? And if we’ve already added this army of permanent employees, why are we still paying $20.7 billion a year for consultants?

Higher Compensation Per Employee

The PBO is very clear: the biggest driver of rising personnel costs is compensation per employee, and that means two things, salaries and pensions.

Right now, the average current compensation per full-time equivalent (FTE) mainly salaries, wages, and standard compensation like overtime and severance is about $123,000. By 2029–30, the PBO projects that will rise to $139,000. That growth tracks almost exactly with inflation. In other words, automatic wage increases baked into union contracts keep driving the number upward every single year.

But that’s not the full story. Once you add in the cost of pensions and other benefits things like medical and dental coverage, disability insurance, and one-time payments the total cost per federal employee hits more than $172,000 by 2029–30.

That’s not optional spending. Those are long-term, locked-in obligations. Defined-benefit pensions guarantee that every new permanent hire means decades of taxpayer-funded payouts.

Put that $172,000 figure next to the median Canadian employment income: about $67,000. Federal employees now cost taxpayers two and a half times the income of the average Canadian worker.

And unlike private-sector jobs, these packages come with absolute security. Indeterminate (permanent) staff can’t easily be laid off. Their wage increases are negotiated centrally. Their pensions are guaranteed by law.

The cost per worker is rising not because Ottawa is suddenly offering lavish perks on top of perks, but because the base salaries and pension costs are compounding over time. With nearly 442,000 FTEs projected by 2030, even small increases per person mean billions more in total personnel expenses.

This is why the PBO notes that higher compensation per employee, layered on top of workforce growth, is the real engine behind the jump from $71.1 billion in 2024–25 to $76.2 billion in 2029–30.

The Consultant Addiction

So here’s the part that makes no sense. Ottawa has added nearly 90,000 new permanent bureaucrats in the past decade. And yet, despite this enormous permanent payroll, the government is still writing massive cheques to outside consultants.

In 2024 alone, the so-called Big Four consulting firms collected roughly $240 million in federal contracts: Deloitte walked away with $136.4 million, KPMG billed $75.9 million, while Ernst & Young and PwC split another $27 million between them. That’s a quarter-billion dollars in just one year, to four private firms.

And it doesn’t end there. In the IT category Ottawa calls it informatics outsourcing hit $2.662 billion in 2022–23. Billions for outside IT contractors, even though the PBO itself found those contractors cost 22% to 25.7% more than hiring a public servant for the same work.

Think about that. By 2030, Ottawa will employ 442,000 full-time equivalents. Almost half a million public servants. And yet somehow, we still need to blow billions hiring consultants to run our IT systems? Really? With that many bureaucrats on the payroll, you’d think they could manage a computer network.

How many “digital transformation strategies” does one government need? How many billions go out the door before someone asks the obvious question: what are all these public servants actually doing?

That’s the contradiction the PBO has exposed. A permanent, ever-expanding federal workforce that still leans on consultants at a premium. More bureaucrats, more consultants, higher costs all paid for by taxpayers who don’t get the same job security, don’t get the same pensions, and certainly don’t get billion-dollar IT contracts.

Final Thoughts

Everyone deserves a fair wage. Nobody’s arguing that. But what Ottawa has done is write itself a blank cheque, guaranteed raises, guaranteed pensions, guaranteed job security for nearly 442,000 federal workers. Add to that a quarter-billion dollars for outside consultants and another $2.6 billion on IT contractors, and what do we actually get for the money?

Look around. ArriveCAN blew through tens of millions on non-competitive contracts. The so-called green slush fund at Sustainable Technology Canada was riddled with conflicts of interest. The Auditor General keeps flagging “serious deficiencies” year after year, government after government. And what happens? Nothing. Nobody gets fired. No one takes responsibility. Certainly not a minister.

So when the same Ottawa class tells us Canada has a “productivity problem”, the only sane response is: no kidding. Productivity isn’t just about factories or offices. It’s about government too. And right now, we have the most expensive, least accountable public service in Canadian history.

Here’s the reckoning: the federal government is addicted to consultants, its managers refuse to make the workforce actually work, and ministers simply don’t care. As taxpayers, what are we left with? Not shorter wait times in hospitals. Not faster service at passport offices. Not a public service that’s better. We’re left with a system that grows more expensive every year while delivering less.

So the real question is simple: what are we getting for $71 billion? Because from where I sit, the answer is not much.