Trudeau’s bureaucrat hiring spree is out of control

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Bureaucrats love to think of themselves as “public servants,” but who is really serving who around here?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau added another 10,525 bureaucrats to the taxpayer payroll last year. Since becoming prime minister, Trudeau has added more than 108,000 new federal bureaucrats.

That’s a 42 per cent increase in the federal bureaucracy in less than a decade.

Ask yourself, are you getting 42 per cent better services from the federal government? Unless your paycheque comes from taxpayers, the answer is a big fat NO.

While Trudeau’s bureaucracy grew by 42 per cent, Canada’s population grew by 14 per cent.

That means there would be 72,491 fewer federal paper pushers had Trudeau kept growth in the bureaucracy in line with population growth.

It’s not just the size of the bureaucracy that’s ballooning – the cost is too.

The total cost of the federal payroll hit $67 billion last year, a record high. That’s a 68 per cent increase over 2016.

Trudeau gave federal bureaucrats more than one million pay raises in the last four years alone.

Since taking office, Trudeau also rubberstamped about $1.4 billion in taxpayer-funded bonuses to bureaucrats working in federal departments.

The bonuses were paid out despite the Parliamentary Budget Officer finding “less than 50 per cent of [performance] targets are consistently met.”

Then there’s the bonuses at failing Crown corporations.

CBC dished out $15 million in bonuses last year, while their President and CEO Catherine Tait whined about “chronic underfunding” and begged the government for more taxpayer cash. The CBC takes more than $1 billion from taxpayers every year.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation dished out $102 million in bonuses over the last four years, while Canadians couldn’t afford to buy a home. The bonuses rained down, despite the CMHC repeatedly claiming it’s “driven by one goal: housing affordability for all.”

The Bank of Canada dished out more than $60 million in bonuses over the last three years, even though it failed to do its one and only job: keep inflation low and around two per cent.

The average annual compensation for a full-time federal bureaucrat is $125,300, when pay, pension and perks are accounted for, according to the PBO.

There are now more than 110,000 federal bureaucrats taking home a six-figure base salary – an increase of 154 per cent since Trudeau took power.

Meanwhile, data from Statistics Canada suggests the average annual salary among all full-time workers in Canada was less than $70,000 in 2023.

Here’s why all this matters:

First, it’s an issue of fairness. The last few years have spelled hardship for Canadians who don’t work for the government, but do pay the bills.

Countless Canadians were sent to the ranks of the unemployed, lost their business and struggled to afford rising rents and costly grocery trips.

They’re paying higher taxes so more highly-paid bureaucrats can take bigger paycheques.

Second, more than half of the federal government’s day-to-day spending is consumed by the bureaucracy. That means any government that wants to fix the budget dumpster fire must shrink the bureaucracy.

Let’s recap:

Taxpayers paid for 108,000 new federal bureaucrats. Taxpayers paid for more than one million pay raises over the last four years. Taxpayers paid for more than $1 billion in bonuses.

And bureaucrats barely meet even half of their performance targets – targets they set for themselves.

It’s clear Trudeau’s bureaucratic bloat isn’t serving taxpayers. It’s time to find a pin and pop Ottawa’s ballooning bureaucracy.

This column was first published in the Western Standard on July 202, 2024.

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersFederation #FrancoTerrazzano CanadaBureaucracy CanadaGovernmentWorkers CanadaPublicServants

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Land use will be British Columbia’s biggest issue in 2026

Published on December 28, 2025

Duane Rolheiser

By Resource Works

By Geoff Russ

British Columbia will talk about Donald Trump’s tariffs in 2026, and it will keep grinding through affordability. But the issue that will decide whether the province can build, invest, and govern is land use.

The warning signs were there in 2024. Land based industries still generate 12 per cent of B.C.’s GDP, and the province controls more than 90 per cent of the land base, and land policy was already being remade through opaque processes, including government to government tables. When rules for access to land feel unsettled, money flows slow into a trickle.

The Cowichan ruling sends shockwaves

In August 2025, the Cowichan ruling turned that unease into a live wire. The court recognized the Cowichan’s Aboriginal title over roughly 800 acres within Richmond, including lands held by governments and unnamed third parties. It found that grants of fee simple and other interests unjustifiably infringed that title, and declared certain Canada and Richmond titles and interests “defective and invalid,” with those invalidity declarations suspended for 18 months to give governments time to make arrangements.

The reaction has been split. Supporters see a reminder that constitutional rights do not evaporate because land changed hands. Critics see a precedent that leaves private owners exposed, especially because unnamed owners in the claim area were not parties to the case and did not receive formal notice. Even the idea of “coexistence” has become contentious, because both Aboriginal title and fee simple convey exclusive rights to decide land use and capture benefits.

Market chill sets in

McLTAikins translated the risk into advice that landowners and lenders can act on: registered ownership is not immune from constitutional scrutiny, and the land title system cannot cure a constitutional defect where Aboriginal title is established. Their explanation of fee simple reads less like theory than a due diligence checklist that now reaches beyond the registry.

By December, the market was answering. National Post columnist Adam Pankratz reported that an industrial landowner within the Cowichan title area lost a lender and a prospective tenant after a $35 million construction loan was pulled. He also described a separate Richmond hotel deal where a buyer withdrew after citing precedent risk, even though the hotel was not within the declared title lands. His case that uncertainty is already changing behaviour is laid out in Montrose.

Caroline Elliott captured how quickly court language moved into daily life after a City Richmond letter warned some owners that their title might be compromised. Whatever one thinks of that wording, it pushed land law out of the courtroom and into the mortgage conversation.

Mining and exploration stall

The same fault line runs through the critical minerals push. A new mineral claims regime now requires consultation before claims are approved, and critics argue it slows early stage exploration and forces prospectors to reveal targets before they can secure rights. Pankratz made that critique earlier, in his argument about mineral staking.

Resource Works, summarising AME feedback on Mineral Tenure Act modernisation, reported that 69.5 per cent of respondents lacked confidence in proposed changes, and that more than three quarters reported increased uncertainty about doing business in B.C. The theme is not anti consultation. It is that process, capacity, and timelines decide whether consultation produces partnership or paralysis.

The legal layer

Layered on top is the widening fight over UNDRIP implementation and DRIPA. Geoffrey Moyse, KC, called for repeal in a Northern Beat essay on DRIPA, arguing that Section 35 already provides the constitutional framework and that trying to operationalise UNDRIP invites litigation and uncertainty.

Tariffs and housing will still dominate headlines. But they are downstream of land. Until B.C. offers a stable bargain over who can do what, where, and on what foundation, every other promise will be hostage to the same uncertainty. For a province still built on land based wealth, Resource Works argues in its institutional history that the resource economy cannot be separated from land rules. In 2026, that is the main stage.

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Socialism vs. Capitalism

Published on December 26, 2025

Todayville

By John Stossel

People criticize capitalism. A recent Axios-Generation poll says, “College students prefer socialism to capitalism.”

Why?

Because they believe absurd myths. Like the claim that the Soviet Union “wasn’t real socialism.”

Socialism guru Noam Chomsky tells students that. He says the Soviet Union “was about as remote from socialism as you could imagine.”

Give me a break.

The Soviets made private business illegal.

If that’s not socialism, I’m not sure what is.

“Socialism means abolishing private property and … replacing it with some form of collective ownership,” explains economist Ben Powell. “The Soviet Union had an abundance of that.”

Socialism always fails. Look at Venezuela, the richest country in Latin America about 40 years ago. Now people there face food shortages, poverty, misery and election outcomes the regime ignores.

But Al Jazeera claims Venezuela’s failure has “little to do with socialism, and a lot to do with poor governance … economic policies have failed to adjust to reality.”

“That’s the nature of socialism!” exclaims Powell. “Economic policies fail to adjust to reality. Economic reality evolves every day. Millions of decentralized entrepreneurs and consumers make fine tuning adjustments.”

Political leaders can’t keep up with that.

Still, pundits and politicians tell people, socialism does work — in Scandinavia.

“Mad Money’s Jim Cramer calls Norway “as socialist as they come!”

This too is nonsense.

“Sweden isn’t socialist,” says Powell. “Volvo is a private company. Restaurants, hotels, they’re privately owned.”

Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all free market economies.

Denmark’s former prime minister was so annoyed with economically ignorant Americans like Bernie Sanders calling Scandanavia “socialist,” he came to America to tell Harvard students that his country “is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Powell says young people “hear the preaching of socialism, about equality, but they don’t look on what it actually delivers: poverty, starvation, early death.”

For thousands of years, the world had almost no wealth creation. Then, some countries tried capitalism. That changed everything.

“In the last 20 years, we’ve seen more humans escape extreme poverty than any other time in human history, and that’s because of markets,” says Powell.

Capitalism makes poor people richer.

Former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) calls capitalism “slavery by another name.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) claims, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”

That’s another myth.

People think there’s a fixed amount of money. So when someone gets rich, others lose.

But it’s not true. In a free market, the only way entrepreneurs can get rich is by creating new wealth.

Yes, Steve Jobs pocketed billions, but by creating Apple, he gave the rest of us even more. He invented technology that makes all of us better off.

“I hope that we get 100 new super billionaires,” says economist Dan Mitchell, “because that means 100 new people figured out ways to make the rest of our lives better off.”

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich advocates the opposite: “Let’s abolish billionaires,” he says.

He misses the most important fact about capitalism: it’s voluntary.

“I’m not giving Jeff Bezos any money unless he’s selling me something that I value more than that money,” says Mitchell.

It’s why under capitalism, the poor and middle class get richer, too.

“The economic pie grows,” says Mitchell. “We are much richer than our grandparents.”

When the media say the “middle class is in decline,” they’re technically right, but they don’t understand why it’s shrinking.

“It’s shrinking because more and more people are moving into upper income quintiles,” says Mitchell. “The rich get richer in a capitalist society. But guess what? The rest of us get richer as well.”

I cover more myths about socialism and capitalism in my new video.