Oscar Wilde once observed that bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

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This would seem to be the maxim driving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approach to the size of the federal government and its out-of-control growth almost from the day he took office.

By the most recent count, the Canadian government had 357,247 public servants. If all these federal employees were gathered into a single municipality, it would be the 16th most populous in the country, ahead of the city of Markham on the outskirts of Toronto.

Another way to understand this is to consider that there are today 100,000 more federal public employees than there were eight years ago, representing an almost 40% increase in the government’s labour force over Trudeau’s mandate.

Whether you look at this in nominal terms, as a percentage, or in terms of the number of civil servants per 1,000 inhabitants, no other prime minister in the last forty years has inflated the public service as much.

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