Canada’s Public Service Union Predator Class

When Statistics Canada released the latest Labour Force Survey earlier this month, the headlines were predictable. The unemployment rate fell to 6.5 percent. Overall employment edged down by 25,000. The coverage, as it almost always does, mostly stopped there.

But buried several tables into the same release is a figure that deserves considerably more attention. In January 2026, 4.597 million Canadians worked in the public sector—all employees of federal, provincial, and local governments, government agencies, Crown corporations, and publicly funded establishments like schools, universities, and hospitals.

That represents 21.8 percent of everyone employed in Canada. It is a percentage that has been quietly climbing for five years, and it puts Canada on a trajectory back toward territory last occupied before the fiscal consolidations of the 1990s.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released an analysis this week of just what the Liberal government’s pursuit of government savings might mean for the federal public service — i.e., first and foremost, significant job cuts. The left-wing think tank estimates 57,000 total jobs might be shed by 2028, and focuses in particular on the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Employment and Social Development, and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship

Now Ottawa’s government union bosses are worried about services?

Really?

After the government rubber-stamped hundreds of millions in bonuses, added tens of thousands of bureaucrats, dished out pay raises and struggled to meet half of its performance targets, now union bosses are worried about services?

The Conservative Party of Canada is muted on the issue though they are starting to drop hints.

The Liberals won’t even talk about it.

Legacy media outlets reliant on government largesse won’t touch it.

Across Canada, government employment has exploded, dwarfing job-growth numbers in the private sector and raising serious questions about the affordability of this government hiring spree.

Specifically, according to our new study, from 2019 to 2023 employment in the government sector (which includes federal, provincial and local governments nationwide) increased by 13.3% compared to just 3.6% in the private sector (including self-employment).

Guess which way public service unions lean politically.

There’s a wondrous circularity to the demand of federal public servants to work from the comfort of their homes rather than trudging into the offices around Ottawa that were built to house them.

Here’s the circle: COVID-19 came along and put huge demands on their services. The Trudeau government responded by hiring enormous numbers of new employees who were able, due to pandemic restrictions, to temporarily work from home. Now the virus is under control but the swollen numbers remain, and they don’t want to return to the office because, they claim, there’s not enough room available to accommodate them all.

A union representing some 27,000 federal public servants is calling for a parliamentary committee to hold an inquiry into the three-day-a-week return to office mandate.

The Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) believes the return-to-office policy has been “surrounded by catastrophic failures” and says the standing committee on government operations and estimates should investigate.

CAPE president Nathan Prier said his union’s members have lost confidence in the senior management of the civil service.

OTTAWA — While Canadians struggle with the ongoing cost of living and affordability crisis, newly-released documents suggest some overtime-addicted public servants are doing just fine.

As questions swirl around Parliament Hill over the state of Canada’s bloated bureaucracy, documents obtained by The Toronto Sun show government agencies are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in overtime.

It’s fun to imagine the planning that went into the campaign launched this week by the Ottawa chapter of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union representing federal government workers.

“Okay, team, what’s the best way to make the case that we shouldn’t go back to the office, two years after everyone else did?”

“Ooh! Why don’t we call for a boycott of Ottawa small businesses that are still trying to scrape themselves off the pavement after COVID-19 shutdowns, the convoy siege and the abandonment of downtown?”