The federal government spent $71.1 billion on personnel costs in fiscal year 2024-25, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has estimated, up from $69.6 billion the year before. Unfortunately, even though the number of public service jobs fell by about three per cent in 2025, the count of full-time equivalents, which accounts for whether those jobs were full-time or part-time, continued to grow, helping drive the cost increase. And despite the slight decline in the count of public servants in 2025, last year still capped off a decade of significant growth: from 257,034 in 2015, the federal public service expanded by more than 100,000, or over 39 per cent, to 357,965 by 2025.

For the high and increasing costs Canadian taxpayers pay for federal public servants, is there at least a good

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