Cost of swelling Public Servants skyrockets

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Cost of swelling PS skyrockets

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Opinion
Barry Artiste, Now Public Contributor

Only in Canada can Canadian Taxpayers get more for less, that being  more higher paid civil servants to do less work, provide less services, less accountability,  less health care funding, etcetera, etcetera,,,,,as my previous story  today on  Bogus Visa Students and College Scams The CBSA internal report shows the federal government is not investigating foreign students guilty of fraud because CBSA only have three officers and one intelligence analyst working on 550 cases. Yet for some strange reason the civil service has hired more highly paid lawyers at an all time high.  Makes sense when they call what they do a Practice, Yep, practicing on screwing the taxpayers once again. What better way to learn this practice than as a civil servant.

 url="http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=560048d9-e545-4f02-8b8f-50699e771de5"]A decade after unprecedented and painful cuts, the federal bureaucracy has ballooned close to its former size, increasing its overall cost to Canadians by 50 per cent.

The findings are confirmed in the biggest pay study undertaken by the government, which also found that federal public servants are earning a "slight premium" over their private-sector counterparts, especially those working in low-level jobs or outside major cities.

The study, ordered by former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock in 2004, was quietly posted on the government website last week.

The study shows that not only are there more public servants than there were since the end of the downsizing in 1997-98, but they earn higher salaries, take more vacation, book off sick more frequently, suffer from rising rates of depression and anxiety, take more parental leave and face bigger health and dental bills.

Similarly, the face of the public service has changed since then: More higher-priced professionals such as lawyers, economists, computer specialists and executives have been hired, and there are fewer secretaries, clerks and tradespeople, who once dominated the federal payroll.

As well, the costs of about every piece of the compensation package, from pensions and salaries to health plans, have increased, except for overtime -- a finding that surprised many because of the mounting workloads left following the massive job cuts of the 1990s.

The 800-page report also calls for a major revamping of the way the government compensates its employees, which has largely remained the same since 1967 when unions first won the right to negotiate contracts for workers.

It could mean major changes to how the public service is organized and managed and how bureaucrats are paid.

The report's 77 recommendations will set the stage for a major debate on potentially divisive issues, such as getting rid of the right to strike, reducing the number of unions, creating more arms-length federal agencies, slashing the number of executives, boosting performance pay and introducing bonuses for non-executives, rethinking early retirement at age 55, introducing new cost-of-living differentials and offering a menu of benefits that will allow public servants to choose what they want in their overall compensation package.

The report argues that the world has changed dramatically in the past 40 years and the government needs new compensation policies to keep up that are "fair" to workers and "affordable" to Canadians.

This calls for a public service with different skills, and benefits will need to be tailored suit it.

"The temptation will be to 'let the cup pass'," said the report. "But each of these areas, in its own way, is urgently in need of attention if we are to renew our compensation regime to support our employees wisely as the great generational shift from the baby boom generation to its successors unfolds over the next decade."

To fight the deficit, the Chretien government cut the public service by nearly a quarter, wiping 75,000 jobs off the payroll from 1994 to 1998. By 2004, the size of the public service had mushroomed, especially in the national capital region.