Federal Government hands out more than 800,000 raises in the past three years

BY PAUL JUNOR

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is committed to ensuring that the federal government is accountable in the ways it spends Canadian’ hard-earned tax dollars.

It is driven to unearth the ways that the government has misspent federal dollars and bring this to the attention of the public.

On Tuesday, April 25^th, 2023, it released an investigation by one of its journalists, Ryan Thorpe who analyzed government documents from 2020 to 2022 regarding pay increases for federal employees. These internal government records revealed that approximately 802,043 federal bureaucrats received a raise during this time period.

An analysis of the data revealed that in 2020 about 258,596 employees received an economic pay increase,151,247 in 2021 and 29,435 in 2022. While 114,538 received a step pay increase in 2020,115,399 in 2021 and 132,827 in 2022.

This translates to approximately 373,134 in 2020, 266,646 in 2021 and 162,263 in 2022. This means that over 90% of government employees received at least one raise in 2020 and 2021.

Furthermore, there were an additional 162,263 raises that were given to federal employees in 2022. CTF acknowledges that, “It remains unclear how many individual employees received a pay bump last year. It’s not clear whether some staff may have received more than one raise, in the form of an economic increase and a step increase.”

The strike started on Wednesday, April 19^th, when the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which asked for a 13.5% increase in pay over three years from the government, reached an Impasse. CTF states that PSAC is requesting almost 47 compensation increases over three years, which includes many non-wage benefits. The CTF observes that according to the Treasury Board of Canada this could add  $9.3 billion to government spending.

In 2020, it was revealed that Federal employees received a 6.64% pay raise after the PSAC negotiated a three-year deal with the federal government in 2020. Furthermore, $125,300 is the average compensation for federal employees who are in full-time employment as noted by the Parliamentary Budget Officer compared to $64,000 according to data from 2022 Statistics Canada.

The conservative think tank, the Fraser Institute mentioned on Tuesday, April 18^th, that there has been an increase of 8.5% wage premium for federal employees compared to their counterparts in the private sector. Furthermore, around $559 million was paid out in bonuses to federal employees in 2020.

Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of CTF states in the communication, ”Canadians don’t feel sorry for privileged bureaucrats who took pay raises during the pandemic while the rest of us worried about missing paychecks or losing our jobs. The fact  they’re now striking for billions more shows how out-of-touch they are.”

It is interesting that information released from the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on March 2023 shows that less than half of federal government workers met the government performance targets regularly each year. In addition, there has been an increase to the federal workforce by 31,227 in the last two years, which has resulted in an increase by 31% to the cost of the bureaucracy.

Terrazzano concludes, “Taxpayers have already paid for hundreds of thousands of pay raises, hundreds of millions in bonuses, and for tens of thousands of new bureaucrats. The bloated bureaucracy doesn’t deserve a penny more from taxpayers.”