Public services will balloon to 409,000 in five years, according to PBO

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OTTAWA – Seven years of jobs in Canada’s public service will continue with billions of dollars in additional spending that will boost the size of the workforce to about 409,000 jobs within five years, Congressional budget officials said.

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Finance Council President Mona Fortier presented the government’s latest spending plan (known as the Supplemental Estimate (B)), asking Congress to approve an additional $21 billion. This is one of his biggest questions in the supplementary estimates, other than emergency spending to deal with the pandemic.

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In his latest report, Congressional Budget Officer Yves Giroud said $2.3 billion of this additional spending is needed for salaries and benefits in the expanding bureaucracy, and this year’s wage bill will be reduced to $55 billion. We estimate that it will push up to the dollar. That’s over $130,000 per full-time employee.

The government has been hiring massive amounts since 2015 and has gone too far to deal with the pandemic. Massive adoption was:

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But there is more to come.

The fall economic statement said:

What’s more, Chief Information Officer Catherine Luelo says public services will need to fill about 7,000 IT jobs. The military is short of about 10,000 members.

Public services, including the military, increased from 342,000 jobs in 2015-16 to 391,000 in 2020-21, according to PBO calculations. This means public services are much better than they were a decade ago, when the Harper administration cut thousands of jobs.

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According to the PBO, in the seven years since Trudeau was in office, labor costs have increased an average of 6.7% annually, from $39.6 billion to $60.7 billion. This translates to about a 4% increase in compensation per full-time employee.

All this extra spending should appease self-restraint and nervous civil servants who may have been prepared for the ax to start falling on federal jobs. It has revealed nearly $22 billion in new spending since its budget, much of it on internal services. (p.61-66)

Giroud said those who looked at the economic update for signs that the sector would reallocate funds or cut spending found a “very different” story.

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“It’s growing,” he said. “With the amounts announced in the fall economic statement or before, yes they are expanding public services,” he said.

The supplemental estimate of $21 billion in claims covers a number of spending measures that circumvented the normal financial cycle.

About one-third of the budget relates to spending announced in the April budget, another third relates to indigenous settlements, and the remainder is included in the budget or the fall economic update. It is related to an initiative that was not Their spending authorizations were jam-packed in the six months between the budget and the fall update.

And will the spending and strategic review announced in the 2022 budget save $9 billion over five years? code.

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But Giroux says the impact of the reviews will go largely unnoticed.

On the spending review, the government aimed to start saving $3 billion over 2023-2024. It hoped to find funding by reviewing previously announced spending to ensure the program fits the government’s “changing circumstances.”

The government declared victory in the fiscal refresh spending review, recording $3.8 billion in savings for COVID-19 benefits that didn’t need to be spent. Giroux argued that it was misleading to view last year’s savings as credit for savings that the government promised to find in a later review.

Regarding the strategic review, Giroux said it was “pretty easy” for the department to find savings and all the money would go to them.

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On top of that, the government is spending another $2.25 billion over six years to improve service delivery rather than looking at operational effectiveness to reduce costs.

“They will probably realize they can’t spend all the money they’re allocating to the department and claim it as a savings,” says Giroux.

The big question, however, is why, despite hiring so many people, the service hasn’t improved. For months, people waited for passports, immigration applications and veteran benefits to be processed.

A major barrier to service improvement is investing in technology and hiring the right people. It’s unclear whether governments are hiring skilled talent for the future, or just vying for talent to cope with the pressure of backlogs and delays.

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For example, the Passport backlog was the result of some convergence factor overwhelming the system with more applications than it could handle. These included a modernization plan to automate passport processing delayed by COVID-19.

“The old system, which had been in place since the late 1990s, had a lot of jobs. said one official who was not authorized to speak.

Giroux said the additional funding is aimed at resolving the service crisis. But ideally, governments are also hiring workers with the skills that will be needed in the future.

“Is the government preparing for that?” asked Giroux. “They know the demographics and public service make-up, so they should have a pretty good idea of ​​where they want to go, and hopefully recruit them to that effect.”

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Tracking growth in public services is difficult as there appears to be no overall human resource plan. The CIO, Luelo, is working on a digital workforce plan, but the finance committee did not respond to questions about future workforce planning.

For some skills, such as IT expertise, the government cannot match private sector salaries. A high-level IT professional who wants to build in-house, he is attracted to the complexity of the job, but often prefers to work remotely, is often not bilingual, and prefers a bureaucratic career. They are not attracted to the traditional charm of pensions and benefits.

The problem is that the department must fill the gap with more outsourcing, which some argue is already overkill and should be curbed.

Sean Boots, senior policy adviser for Canadian Digital Service, who was involved in a research project at Carleton University that investigated contracts, recently told a Congressional committee that he was using government laptops, email and buildings to test how many people said the department doesn’t know which contractors are working for them. pass through. Data collected so far suggests that at least 7,700 contractors work in the department, earning an average of $1,400 and a maximum of $2,800 a day.

This article was originally posted on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.