More than 110,000 federal government employees earned six-figure base salaries in 2023, according to access to information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Records show that the number of bureaucrats earning six-figure salaries now makes up about one-third of all federal employees.
Those salaries cost taxpayers at least $13.9 billion last year. This number is likely to be low as the 2023 retroactive salary increases have not yet taken effect.
“Taxpayers are being exploited and bureaucrats can no longer afford six-figure salaries,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF's federal director. “Enough is enough. It's time for the federal government to take some air out of its bloated bureaucracy.”
In 2023, 110,593 federal officials will receive six-figure salaries, an increase of 7.6 percent compared to 2022. That same year, 102,761 federal bureaucrats received six-figure salaries.
Records obtained by CTF only detail basic salaries and do not include the cost of other benefits paid to bureaucrats.
Since 2015, the number of federal officials receiving a base salary of $100,000 or more has jumped 154%.
Meanwhile, the number of bureaucrats increased by about 40%, and federal labor costs increased by 68%.
Federal payroll costs to taxpayers hit a record $67.4 billion in 2023, according to Congressional Budget Officials.
“Since 2016, we have noticed a notable increase in the number of civil servants and a commensurate increase in spending… but we have not seen a similar improvement in services,” said the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Yves Giroux said.
The jump in six-figure salaries in the federal government comes after years of overwhelming performance results across departments.
“Less than 50 percent [performance] According to PBO's 2023 report, the targets have been consistently achieved within the same year.
The CTF called on the federal government to proactively disclose the number of employees earning six-figure salaries through an annual “Sunshine List.”
All provincial governments except Prince Edward Island and Quebec provide annual compensation disclosure lists to taxpayers.
The average compensation for a full-time federal employee is $125,300, including salary, pension, paid time off, shift premiums and other benefits, according to the PBO.
Meanwhile, the average annual income for all full-time workers in 2023 was less than $70,000, according to Statistics Canada data.
According to a 2023 report by the Fraser Institute, a non-partisan, independent think tank, public servants across Canada receive “an average pay premium of 8.5 per cent over private sector employees.”
The report notes that “available data on non-wage benefits suggest that the government sector has advantages over the private sector in the form of pension security and other benefits.”
“The government must be transparent with taxpayers, and that means publishing the Sunshine List, which discloses the salaries of the highest-paid bureaucrats,” Terrazzano said. “We pay the bills, so we have a right to know how many six-figure bureaucrats we're paying.”
