Fed executive pay rises $571 million since 2015

Executive compensation in the federal government spiked by more than half-a-billion dollars since 2015, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. 

From 2015 to 2022, executive compensation across federal departments and agencies rose from $1.38 billion to $1.95 billion – an increase of 41 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of federal executives grew from 7,138 to 9,371 – an increase of 31 per cent. 

Inflation increased by 19.4 per cent between 2015 and 2022, according to Statistics Canada data. 

The average annual compensation among federal executives also rose from $193,600 to $208,480 during that period. 

“Taxpayers need help with the rising cost of living, not higher taxes to pay for more highly paid paper-pushers,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “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?”

Table: Federal executive compensation, 2015 to 2022

The spike in federal c-suite pay follows years of underwhelming performance results across departments and agencies. 

In 2022-23, federal departments hit just 50 per cent of their performance targets, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Each year from 2018 through 2021, federal departments met less than half of their performance targets.

“Less than 50 per cent of performance targets are consistently met within the same year,” according to a 2023 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government’s independent budget watchdog. 

About 90 per cent of federal executives get a bonus each year, according to records obtained by the CTF. The feds handed out $202 million in bonuses in 2022, with the average bonus among executives being $18,252. 

The feds handed out $1.3 billion in bonuses since 2015. The annual cost to taxpayers for federal bonuses has risen by 46 per cent during that time. 

The number of employees receiving a six-figure annual salary has more than doubled under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

A total of 102,761 federal bureaucrats received a six-figure salary in 2022, according to access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. When Trudeau came to power in 2015, 43,424 federal bureaucrats were collecting a six-figure salary.

The feds also handed out more than 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. 

Under the Trudeau government, the size of the federal bureaucracy has spiked by about 40 per cent, with more than 98,000 new hires. 

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