Government documents acquired by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) reveal that 114,443 employees received a salary of more than $100,000 in 2021. The number of employees receiving six-figure salaries increased by 45,426 during the pandemic.
The CTF is calling on the federal government to release a sunshine list similar to the Ontario government’s, in which salaries of public sector employees are publicly disclosed.
“We’re not all in this together,” said Federal Director of the CTF Franco Terrazzano.
“It’s not fair to ask the Canadians who lost their job or took a pay cut during the pandemic to pay higher taxes so the federal government can add thousands of highly paid bureaucrats.”
The number of employees that should be included in a federal sunshine list disclosing salaries of more than $100,000 annually is illustrated in the table below.
There were 312,825 government employees who received a pay raise during the pandemic, according to an access to information request filed by the CTF.
According to the think tank Secondstreet.org, the federal government has no records of its employees ever receiving a cut in their pay. The government added 19,151 extra employees from March 2020 to March 2021.
As government-enforced lockdowns forced Canadians out of work, members of parliament took three pay raises during the pandemic, ranging from an extra $10,600 for backbench MPs to over $21,000 for the Prime Minister as compared to pre-pandemic levels.
“Taxpayers deserve to know that 45,000 more federal bureaucrats are receiving a six-figure salary than before the pandemic,” said Terrazzano.
“Taxpayers can’t afford the ballooning bureaucracy and that means the government should stop hiring so many highly paid bureaucrats.”
Government spending continues to increase even as 59% of Canadians believe the country is already in the midst of an economic recession, a poll released last month shows. Many economists are also predicting a recession could come as soon as early next year.
The current inflation rate is sitting at 8.1% and the national debt at over $1 trillion.
