OTTAWA — Despite only meeting performance goals less than 60 per cent of the time, federal public servants received just under $200 million in bonuses last year, mostly to public administration executives.
That brings total bonuses handed to federal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to over half a billion dollars, paid out between the 2019–20 and 2021–22 fiscal years.
In documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, 89 per cent of federal executives received yearly bonuses during the pandemic.
“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,” he said. “The government needs to stop rewarding failure with our tax dollars.”
That’s up from the $171 million in bonuses handed out by the federal government to public workers in 2020, which saw federal departments meet only 48 per cent of their performance metrics.
The total amount of bonus money handed out to federal workers for performance last year could still increase, say notes attached to the request.
“The performance pay for (fiscal year) 2021-22 is being disbursed in the 2022-23 fiscal year,” reads an addendum attached to the response to the CTF’s access to information request.
“(The information in the response) present requested information on performance pay for 2021-22 fiscal year paid out until December 2022.”
Since the fiscal year 2022–23 is still in progress, the note continues, some bonus payments are still pending and weren’t included in the government’s accounting.
Most of the $198 million handed out last year went to executives in the public service, amounting to $147,075,422.
Of that, $118,829,920 was handed out to 6,878 of Canada’s 7,663 executive-level public workers in the core public administration, while 1,345 of the 1,589 executives employed by separate Crown agencies earned $28,245,502.
Between both core public administration and separate agencies, all but 1,029 executives received performance pay, amounting to nearly $18,000 per person on average.
In addition to executives, bonuses paid to senior-level public servants in the law management job category were included in that category, as were certain pay grades in the defence scientific, medicine and “mediation conciliation” sub-group of the program administration group.
For those beneath the executive class, 8,415 out of 326,705 public servants shared $51,547,684 in bonuses last year.
In the core departments, $26,904,688 was handed out to public servants, while those in outside agencies netted $24,642,996 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 arm’s-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.
Earlier this month, National Post reported employees of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were paid $16 million in performance incentives in 2022, with around 80 per cent of the CBC’s workforce receiving some sort of bonus last year.
Overall performance goals were met just 60 per cent of the time, records show. Performance commitments for executives are based on role-specific performance measures, said Treasury Board Secretariat spokesperson Martin Potvin.
“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,” he told the National Post.
“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.”
Those measures include those beyond the department’s stated performance goals, and reflect each employee’s contribution to department programs and priorities.
Stephanie Kusie, the Opposition critic for Treasury Board, pointed to both recent and ongoing slowdowns in government services.
“There continues to be uncertainty and chaos in our public services and federally regulated sectors like passport offices, airports and train stations,” Kusie said.
“Taxpayers should not be paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses while the government fails to deliver basic public services.”
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