Federal bureaucracy a seven-layer dip of management 

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With respect to the adage “No one can serve two masters,” that’s unfortunate because Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux calculates that the average federal frontline worker has seven managers. 

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We may finally have discovered why the current federal government is incapable of getting anything done. There are so many layers of management piled one on top of another that very little gets done. 

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Call it paralysis by over management. 

Ottawa’s bureaucracy is so bloated that were it a person, it would make morbid obesity look like a health craze. 

In a February review of federal spending, Giroux estimated Ottawa now pays $67.4 billion a year in salaries and benefits. That’s a 68% increase since the Liberals took over. On top of that, there are 428,000 full-time federal staff, an increase of 40% under the Trudeau government. 

According to the PBO, “It is not uncommon for departments to have five levels of executives and associate deputy ministers, or more, and one deputy minister. It leads to a situation where an employee can have seven levels of management above them.” 

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Now consider how risk-averse bureaucrats are by nature. Few are willing to stick their necks out to make a decision for which they’d be held accountable. In this seven-layer dip, files and decisions pass up the chain, and up further, then back down for more details, then up again for further contemplation. 

Along the way there are a whole forest of committee meetings, followed by consultants’ reports, which will lead to another round of meetings. 

Five years ago, the Liberal government promised to plant two billion trees to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. A generous estimate is that so far they have managed to plant just 400 million. 

That’s likely because rather than two billion trees in the ground, all the federal civil service has managed is cutting down two billion trees to print reports on the best way to plant two billion trees. 

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Giroux told the Commons government operations committee that what concerned him most about this top-heavy arrangement is “the disconnect between the increased levels of spending … and the performance indicators that don’t seem to be markedly improved.” 

Last year, the PBO reported that under half of federal departments met their production targets, despite the fact federal agencies and departments set their own targets. They can’t even meet those. 

Since they came to office in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals have grown the federal civil service four times faster than the rate of Canada’s population growth. 

The federal bureaucracy is very much larger than it was. It costs far more. Yet service has gotten worse, not better. The added money for payroll is devoured by needless management. 

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It’s not hard to believe the federal inaction is the result of piling managers on top of managers on top of managers, rather than hiring more frontline employees who actually provide service to taxpayers. 

The insulting cherry on top of this sundae is that, despite accomplishing so little, 89% of federal managers and executives receive bonuses averaging $17,000 a year. 

Are you getting an extra $1,400 a month extra from your employer on top of your standard pay? Of course not. But you’re obliged to pay for civil servants’ bonuses. 

In the private sector, only 29% of administrators receive bonuses and most of them receive less than half the size of federal bonuses. 

Whenever I write about subjects having to deal with federal hiring and pay, civil servants insist they are underpaid compared to private-sector colleagues. 

But that’s just not so. They are better paid, receive better pensions, are far less likely to be laid off, have richer benefits, work fewer hours a day, fewer weeks a year and fewer years before receiving full pensions. 

And increasingly they are spending more of their time on process and less on service. 

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