'Inefficient' federal servants received $198 million in bonuses last year, says CTF

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Though federal public servants only achieved their performance goals half the time last year, public administration executives still justified handing out $200 million in bonuses.

During the COVID pandemic, federal workers received over half a billion dollars in bonuses between the 2019/20 and 2021/22 fiscal years.

According to a Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) access to information request, nearly 9-in-10 (89%) federal executives received yearly bonuses during that period.

“Maybe, when taxpayers are struggling to pay for groceries, bureaucrats could give the bonuses a break,” said CTF Federal Director Franco Terrazzano.

“If you don’t meet half of your targets in the real world, you get shown the door, not handed a big fat bonus cheque. The government needs to stop rewarding failure with our tax dollars.”

The BDC issued its employees $93 million in bonuses during the two pandemic-riddled years. They handed out an average of $20,158 in 2020 and $19,923 in 2021, and also gave $11 million in pay raises — without a single pay cut.

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The $198 million in bonuses handed out last year, which could still increase, marks a noticeable rise from the $171 million given to public workers in 2020 — who met less than half (48%) of their performance metrics then.

“The performance pay for 2021/22 is being disbursed in the 2022/23 fiscal year,” read the access to information documents, reflecting bonuses paid out until December 2022.

Government accounting included most bonuses because some payments for 2022/23 remain pending.

According to the CTF documents, Justice Canada spent the most on bonuses, distributing nearly $16 million to 98% of its executives and non-executive employees, despite only achieving eight of its 45 annual targets in 2019/20.

Most of the $198 million handed out last year went to executives in the public service, amounting to $147,075,422.

According to the the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), pay raises for MLAs range from an extra $7,023 for a backbench MLA to an additional $12,131 for Premier Scott Moe.

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Of that, $118,829,920 went to 6,878 of Canada’s 7,663 executive-level public workers in the core public administration.

For 1,345 of the 1,589 executives employed by separate Crown agencies, they earned $28,245,502. Of that, only 1,029 executives received nearly $18,000 per person in performance incentive pay.

“Core public administration” refers to direct departments of government ministries, including the Department of Finance, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Treasury Board, and the Department of National Defence.

“Separate agencies” are arms-length federally-overseen organizations, such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the National Capital Commission, the Canada Revenue Agency, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

According to the Treasury Board Secretariat, they base executive performance commitments on role-specific performance measures, which entitle them to incentive pay.

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“Departmental plans set out broad, high-level targets for departments and their programs while performance targets for individual employees are set using specific criteria, which include management excellence and corporate objectives,” said the secretariat.

“To draw a parallel between the two does not provide an accurate assessment of either one — individual performance measures are associated with the priorities of the team, the organization and the Government of Canada.”

According to the Board Secretariat, those measures include those beyond the department’s stated performance goals and reflect each employee’s contribution to department programs and priorities.

In addition, those who report to executives also received bonuses last year, but 8,415 out of 326,705 public servants shared the $51,547,684.

In the core departments, public servants received $26,904,688, and those from external agencies netted $24,642,996

Among the other entities entitled to incentive pay is the CBC, which received $16 million in bonuses last year, going to almost 80% of its workforce that met its performance goals only 60% of the time.