The Senate, that bastion of sober second thought, made the news late last year when it adopted a budget for 2023-24 that clocked in at a heady $126.7-million.
The figure shocked people inside and outside the Senate, because it represented a 70-per-cent increase over the budget in fiscal 2015-16, the year the Trudeau Liberals came to power.
In just eight fiscal years, the annual cost of the Senate to taxpayers has jumped from $74.5-million to its current allocation. The upper chamber’s administrative costs alone are rising 8.6 per cent this year compared to last, a pace that outstrips the country’s elevated inflation rate, which hit 6.8 per cent in November.
The Senate’s cost increases are also badly outpacing those of the House of Commons, which rose 42 per cent over the same period, according to the Commons Board of Internal Economy annual financial statements.
The Senate’s leader of the opposition, Don Plett, has questioned the value for money Canadians are getting from a chamber that hasn’t had a full complement of members since 2018. The Senate is currently 12 members short of its 105 total; at one point last year, it was down 17.
Another senator, Scott Tannas, has called for a temporary hiring freeze while the body searches for ways to cuts its ballooning expenses.
The hiring freeze is an excellent idea. One of the factors in the Senate’s growing cost is the rise in the number of civil servants assigned to support it.
The Senate had the equivalent of 372 full-time employees in 2017. Today it has 493, a 32.5-per-cent jump over a period during much of which, as has already been noted, the chamber has had at least a dozen vacancies.
That hard-to-square equation – more public employees working for fewer senators – fits into the broader context of the civil service hiring spree that has become a trademark of the Trudeau era.
Since fiscal 2016, the Liberals have more than undone the cutbacks to the core federal civil service implemented by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. (The core civil service excludes Crown corporations and a number of government bodies, such as Canada Post and the Canada Revenue Agency.)
The number of bureaucrats working at the end of each fiscal year has jumped from 195,565 in 2015 to 254,309 in 2022 – a 30-per-cent increase compared to the Harper government’s nearly 10-per-cent decrease from 2010 to 2015.
The trend has been broad-based and can’t be pinned on extraordinary circumstances. Out of 58 federal departments and agencies in the core civil service, 53 increased their employee count between 2015 and 2021.
This massive hiring raises questions about long-term costs for Ottawa, and also about accountability. There is no metric for gauging the effectiveness of the Liberals’ push to grow the federal civil service; if anything, there is evidence the money has done nothing to improve federal services – just ask anyone who has had to wait for months to get a new passport, or to have their immigration application processed.
The hiring spree is rendered even more complicated by yet another troubling Trudeau-era tendency – the more than 40-per-cent increase in spending on federal outsourcing of professional and special services from 2015 to 2022. The total federal spend on contracts for 2020-2021 was $11.8-billion.
The Trudeau government’s taste for hiring consultants is at odds with its 2015 election promise to cut back on outsourcing. And it makes the civil service hiring spree yet more problematic: Why take on so many new employees while also being increasingly reliant on expensive outside experts?
Under the Liberals, the Senate is paying more people to work for fewer senators, and the government is paying more outsiders to do the work of the many more civil servants it has brought into the federal fold.
It doesn’t add up, at least not logically. It will certainly add up budget-wise, though, when it comes to increased spending by Ottawa. And it’s all happening as the country faces the prospect of a recession this year and beyond.
Which is why a hiring freeze in the Senate, and in the civil service as a whole, would be the right signal to send to Canadians at the beginning of 2023. Rising interest rates will slow the economy this year, and people will lose their jobs and have to cut back. The Trudeau government should lead by example, instead of being so out of touch.