Lorne Gunter: Carney's easiest target in spending cuts is bloated bonuses

The federal government’s payroll is now more than $71 billion a year and the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates it will over $76 billion by 2030.

That means about one in every six dollars spent by Ottawa goes to paying the salaries of its legion of bureaucrats. Were Ottawa’s civil service payroll a separate line item in the budget, it would be roughly the same as annual Defence expenditures ($33.9 billion) and spending on Indigenous programs ($38.2 billion), combined.

Now, thanks to a question tabled in the House of Commons by Manitoba Conservative MP Grant Jackson, we also know there are 9,455 federal employees whose base salary is at least $150,000.

And we already knew, thanks to research done by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), that 80 per cent of federal managers (includi