Two things about the federal government are true at once. It became dramatically more expensive, and it did not become noticeably better. Anyone who has renewed a passport, called a tax line or waited on an immigration file can supply their own evidence for the second half.
The first half is in the public accounts. The cost of operating the federal government rose roughly 80% between 2015 and 2024, and the Main Estimates pencil in a further 5% rise for the coming fiscal year. Government employment, for its part, has expanded 21% since early 2020. Employment everywhere else in the economy, the part that pays for government, grew under seven.
Alberta’s Seat at This Table Is the Bill
Every province funds Ottawa, but Alberta’s position is distinct. The province sends billions more into the federal system than flows back, collects nothing from an equalization program now worth $27 billion a year, and watches a $71 billion federal payroll concentrate its growth a comfortable distance from any oil patch, feedlot or fabrication shop. A head office that keeps hiring while service complaints pile up across the country leaves Albertans as the shareholders who never saw a dividend.
And everyone talks tough about this. That is the maddening part. Waste is denounced at every convention of every party. Then a specific transfer, agency, contract, subsidy or protected program comes up for review, and suddenly that particular item is essential, untouchable, somebody’s base. The gravy train survives because each car has a constituency.
The 40,000 Question
Ottawa now advertises a plan to shrink the public service by some 40,000 positions by 2029. The number sounds muscular until it is set against the base. A reduction of that size mostly unwinds the pandemic-era hiring surge and returns headcount toward where the early 2020s found it, against a payroll that kept compounding the entire time. Restraint is one claim. A smaller government is a different claim entirely. The first slows the growth of the bill. The second shrinks it.
A serious version of the exercise would start from outputs rather than inputs. Name the services that improved as spending rose 80%. Publish processing times beside headcount, department by department. Sunset programs that cannot demonstrate results, automatically, unless renewed on evidence. None of this is radical. It is what any Alberta business does in a downturn, and what government structurally never has to.
The Standard Albertans Should Apply
The next federal budget will arrive wrapped in the language of discipline. The test is arithmetic, and it fits on an index card. Is the operating cost of government rising faster than the economy that funds it? Is service measurably better than last year? If the answers are yes and no, in that order, the discipline is theatrical.
Albertans are not anti-government. They are anti-paying-more-for-less, which is the most reasonable position in the country and somehow the rarest one in Ottawa.
Where would you start cutting, and what would you protect? Tell us below.
