If Prime Minister Mark Carney is going to meet his election promise of holding the annual increase in the cost of running the federal government to less than 2% annually, he’s going to have to do a lot better than his election pledge of “capping, not cutting” the size of the federal public service.

Capping the size of the federal bureaucracy would mean endorsing the record of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, who increased those costs by almost 9% annually during his nearly decade in power.

The number of civil servants hired during that period grew by 98,986 to 357,965.

That was a 38% increase — more than triple the growth rate of Canada’s population during the same period — accompanied by a 72.9% hike in the total federal payroll to $69.5 billion last year compared to $40.2 billion in 2

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