The Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in October, 2025.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The public servants who run Library and Archives Canada are under orders from Ottawa to reduce their spending by $11-million in fiscal 2026-27, by $14.7-million the year after, and by $21.1-million each of the three years after that.
Their response? They say they will make the documents they store less available to the public by drastically reducing the number of employees that respond to requests for access.
This has angered reporters and researchers, as it conflicts with the LAC’s obligation to comply with the federal Access to Information and Privacy acts. It has also raised troubling questions about government secrecy.
But that misses the bigger picture: the broad but vague cross-departmental 15-per-cent cut that the Carney government announced in its 2025 budget is one more example of Ottawa’s perpetual poor management of the civil service.
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The government says it is making the cuts to the civil service not to decrease its overall spending but so that it can spend more money on investments in infrastructure and defence made necessary by the threats and actions of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Did the Carney government deliberately set out to reduce access to the nation’s historic archives when it told LAC to reduce its spending? Not likely, because the truth is that the government’s vaunted “comprehensive expenditure review” in its 495-page 2025 budget is no such review at all.
There is no evidence in it of discussions about whether a small department like Library and Archives Canada, which went from 1,026 employees in 2015 to 1,138 in 2025 – a 10.9-per-cent increase – ought to be subject to the exact same reduction in spending as, for instance, Fisheries and Oceans, which jumped 46.8 per cent over the same period and now has 14,451 employees.
Maybe it should or maybe it shouldn’t. The point is that no one appears to have asked the question.
Nor does the budget address the fact that, during the same 10-year period, the population of the federal civil service jumped by 39.1 per cent overall, adding 100,931 people to the payroll, for a total of 357,965.
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The Trudeau Liberals’ hiring spree should have led to a Carney Liberal rethink of how the federal civil service operates and how many people are needed to meet its goals. A true expenditure review, in other words.
Instead, the 2025 budget envisions a drop in the size of the civil service to 330,000 people by the end of 2028-29, which would bring it back to roughly what it was in 2022 (335,957). The Liberals call that number “sustainable” but don’t let on that a federal bureaucracy of that size will still be 29.5 per cent larger than it was in 2015.
The budget is also opaque about how the reductions will be carried out. Instead, it is a vast archipelago of euphemisms designed to spare the government the task of making hard choices.
Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, for example, “will work to become a leaner, more efficient department … by rightsizing leadership by reducing executive and administrative roles to flatten organizational structures and enhance productivity.”
That is consultant-speak at its worst and would get its messenger thrown out of the office of any sensible business owner in the private sector. Then again, the Carney government has no beef with consultants and the way they talk. It plans to lean on external contractors – to the tune of $25.2-billion over four years – for an array of services that, for some reason, all those new hires over the last decade can’t provide.
Governments aren’t businesses. They can keep adding to the payroll without facing the kinds of immediate consequences that can harm or kill a private-sector enterprise.
Only when a national crisis emerges, such as a rupture with the United States over trade, sovereignty and national defence, do politicians realize that their lack of fiscal discipline is, in fact, existential, and that a public service that has been allowed to grow too rapidly is a hindrance to the investment needed to protect and build Canada.
This should be the moment that Ottawa rethinks the mission, cost and size of the civil service. Instead, the Carney Liberals have skirted the issue with ill-conceived cutbacks designed to look like thoughtful action, but which are anything but.