Never enough

The National Post and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation team up to whine about the number of people employed by the federal government - even though the actual data suggests that the anti-civil servant crowd has received exactly what it's wanted over the past decade.

Let's start with the complaint:

John Williamson, the national director of the taxpayers' advocacy group the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said the figures speak volumes about government promises to cut bureaucracy over the past 11 years. "The numbers speak for themselves," he said.

"Politicians are good at talking about changing the way government works, but the reality is that government hasn't changed -- it looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago."...

Mr. Williamson said the civil service cuts of the 1990s were "a passing phase," and the bureaucracy began quietly expanding again as soon as it could.

"It is the nature of the beast to keep filling cubicles in Ottawa," he said "[And] as long as the size of the federal civil service is growing, then the size of government is growing."

One of the problems with the periodic government announcements of cuts or drives for greater efficiency is that while spending on programs is often slashed, those who create and administer these programs rarely lose their jobs, he said.

"Health care gets cut, education gets cut -- things like that -- rather than the size of the federal bureaucracy."

So just how many "cubicles in Ottawa" have been filled over the past decade at the expense of program spending?

In 2006, the last year for which the federal statistics agency has figures, there were just over 380,700 Canadians working for the federal government, down slightly from about 382,000 in 1995. The study looked at bureaucrats working for all government departments, including members of the Canadian Forces, the RCMP and employees of federal boards and agencies such as the Canada Revenue Agency...

The Statistics Canada paper said the overall number of federal civil service positions fell sharply in 1996, under deficit-reduction measures introduced by then finance minister Paul Martin. About 29,000 bureaucrats took early retirement or buyout packages that year, and the overall size of the civil service continued to fall until 1999 when it bottomed out at 326,500 --a drop of more than 55,000 federal government employees in four years.

But from 2000 on, the numbers began to increase. In fact, since 1999, Ottawa has added slightly more than 54,000 new people to the federal payroll, Statistics Canada said, an average growth of 2.2% a year.

The increase is attributed to growth in services such as border guards, RCMP, Canada Revenue Agency and the CBC. Employment in the military and "core" public departments fell over the period.

To anybody interesting in discussing the facts, this would serve as strong evidence that in fact the number of "cubicles in Ottawa" has indeed undergone a significant reduction. Not has Ottawa's civil service not expanded back to its pre-1996 levels, but even during the expansion of government spending over the past few years, staffing at "core public departments" has continued to decline. Meanwhile, the move in the total numbers back toward the starting point is based on the inclusion of programs such as policing, which even the CTF (hopefully) wouldn't be rabid enough to oppose.

But since that fact doesn't fit with the CTF's stock rant about bureaucracy, it's entirely ignored in favour of the usual attempt to demonize the civil service. And the article doesn't bother to seek an opinion from anybody who's actually willing to respond to the study's conclusions - meaning that the CTF's blatant disregard for the facts goes entirely unchallenged.

Sadly, it's articles like this that have enabled the anti-government mantra to become such an overwhelming part of Canada's public debate. And while the Cons would likely revel in the opportunity to undertake another wave of slashing, hopefully other parties with a bit stronger grasp on reality will realize that it's pointless to try to please people who apparently won't be satisfied until the civil service is torn down entirely.