Big Government

A few years back, I wrote a short series of articles entitled “Debt is a Moral Issue.” Writing a series of articles allowed me to go a bit deeper into the subject and provide folks with more information than the format of a single article would allow. In the coming weeks, I propose to do the same, this time on an equally pressing subject. The rapid growth of cost and power consolidated by our bureaucracies and the potential danger such bureaucratic excess poses to democracy, our economy, and personal freedoms.   

The government has inserted itself into everything, and it just keeps growing.

At the national level, Justin Trudeau has increased the size of the federal public service by more than 40%, adding nearly 100,000 new public servants. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, compensation for public servants has also risen by 37% during Trudeau’s tenure—needless to say, a rate exponentially higher than the average Canadian worker has seen.

What benefits are Canadians seeing from this increased spending?

Over the last eight years Trudeau has expanded the size of the federal public service to ensure it plays a more active role in the Canadian economy but, there’s little evidence that bigger government has made Canadians better off. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

According to a 2023 study by the Fraser Institute, only 16% of Canadians believe they are getting good value for money for government services like health care, education, policing, roads, and national defense.

In short, the government is currently spending more money to have more employees working than ever before and providing empirically less/poorer service than before Trudeau’s spending spree on government.

This should not surprise us, a related study by the same organization shows economic growth is maximized when government spending is between 24% and 32% of the size of the national economy. When government spending exceeds this optimal range, it hurts economic growth and lowers citizens’ standard of living. Unfortunately, Canada’s size of government (federal, provincial and local) was far beyond the optimal level at 40.5% of GDP in 2022. Ongoing deficit spending for programs that do little other than grow the federal bureaucracy continues to make life less affordable for Canadians.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll explain how we reached this point. How the growth of and wide-ranging powers ceded to unelected bureaucrats pose a threat to Canada’s economy, to our democracy, and to personal freedoms. Most importantly, I’ll show what we can do to correct the situation

before it’s too late.