Canada is in danger of becoming a bureaucratic state, where the government eats an ever-growing share of the economy. This trend has been accompanied by a productivity crisis and regulatory uncertainty, which has discouraged entrepreneurs and investors. Midway through 2025, however, there is a glimmer of hope that the ship could be turning around.

For the first time in a decade, the size of the federal public service shrank over the past year, shedding nearly

10,000 jobs

. It is a small step towards correcting the excessive, ideologically driven growth of the Canadian government during the Trudeau era.

Ideally, the public service would grow as needed to provide the infrastructure and services to accommodate a growing economy and population. This is the basis for an efficient and responsible government that can fulfill its core duties.

Yet too many bureaucrats and elected officials in both Ottawa and the provinces believe that government should instead be a mechanism for creating jobs out of thin air, and that creed is poisoning our economy.

Between 2016 and 2024, the number of people employed in the federal public service grew by

42 per cent

. Meanwhile, Canadian government expenditures grew to

nearly 43 per cent

of GDP in 2023, compared to 36 per cent in the United States.

Massive spending increases since 2015 have

been accompanied by

longer surgical wait times and rising crime. There is a clear preference for quantity over quality in the Canadian government, and that is both wrong-headed and expensive for the citizens who fund it with their taxes.

For example, in a column published in the Globe and Mail on Monday, Andrew Coyne

pointed out

that 20 years ago, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board employed just 150 people, at a frugal cost of $118 million a year. Today, over 2,100 people work at the CPP Investment Board, which now costs over $6 billion annually and produces middling results at best.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government turned the public service into a glorified white-collar welfare program. Rather than trying to foster economic growth and attract investment, the Liberals apparently figured they could provide the jobs Canadians were seeking.

Unsurprisingly, many of Trudeau’s top

advisers

, staffers and

MPs

cut their teeth during Dalton McGuinty’s premiership of Ontario between 2003 and 2013. During McGuinty’s time as premier, the number of public-sector jobs rose by

nearly 28 per cent

, while the private sector grew by less than six per cent.

This trend only strengthened during the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2023, federal and provincial government employment

grew 13 per cent

in Canada, while private-sector employment increased by less than six per cent. In total,

490,000 workers

were added to the public service.

During an economic crisis, public works can be an effective way to boost employment and leave lasting, monumental pieces of infrastructure. Instead, COVID only gave birth to thousands more managers, pencil-pushers and assistants who were not needed prior to the pandemic, and certainly not after its conclusion in the midst of Canada’s

productivity crisis

.

Among the provinces, British Columbia stands out as the most enthusiastic collaborator of this bureaucratic regime. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of government jobs in B.C. grew by

22 per cent

, while private-sector job growth stood at a paltry 0.5 per cent.

As in Ottawa, B.C. has a two-tier system, as most government jobs are reserved for credentialed managers and post-secondary graduates. On the other hand, blue-collar workers in forestry and mining have seen their

futures darken

as government regulations and taxes destroy jobs in those sectors.

In April, the province’s credit rating was

downgraded

for the fourth time in four years, cut from AA- to A+ by S&P due to “a lack of a credible medium-term plan outlining how the province will tackle its structural budgetary shortfall.”

With health-care wait times

continuing to lengthen

and public-school class sizes ballooning, British Columbians have gotten little in return for the money spent on their behalf. In many ways, B.C. and its troubled resource economy is a microcosm of the same issue that is affecting the rest of the country.

It does not have to be this way, and the Canadian economy need not be defined by its bureaucrats.

There is a

bonanza

of critical minerals and other valuable natural resources in Canada that could lead to an economic renaissance, but only if Ottawa and the provinces follow through on their pledges to

speed up projects

in the “national interest.”

Becoming a dominant supplier of critical minerals to the world should be a pillar of Canada’s destiny. That is well within reach, but only if the Liberal government commits itself to becoming a useful partner of the private sector, rather than trying to permanently encroach upon it.

For example, infrastructure is required for Canada to be able to extract many of the resources in the

North

and other remote regions. The private sector may still be reluctant to undertake that given the costs and the risks, even if the federal government creates a less hostile environment for mining and mineral exploration.

Investing public money into building up that infrastructure could employ thousands of blue-collar Canadians who have been mostly shut out of the decade-long public hiring spree, and who could help open the door to Canada’s future as a stronger, mineral-exporting giant.

A bureaucratic regime will never lead to a better country, and terminating the fantasy of it will not be painless. Nonetheless, it will be necessary if Canada is to become a happier, more prosperous and fairer country for all.

National Post

• Jesse Kline: How to build the Canadian economy without breaking the bank
• NP View: The federal public service needs downsizing, and Poilievre’s the man to do it

Conservative party deputy leader Tim Uppal

 posted on social media

 on Wednesday morning, urging Sikhs to remember 1984.

“Forty one years ago, a pre-planned attack by the Indian army named Operation Blue Star was executed against one of the Sikh’s holiest places of worship, the Golden Temple, on one of the holiest days… Although intended to destroy the community, Sikhs have grown stronger over the years.”

It is not clear whether Uppal posted the reminder of an episode that inflames Khalistani separatists in spite of, or because of, remarks made by his former boss Stephen Harper 

at an event in Brampton, Ont. last weekend

.

The ex-prime minister urged all political parties to heed two points: firstly, that today more than ever, Canada needs a strong relationship with India; and, secondly, that any party that aspires to government must “sever its relations with those who seek bring the battle of India’s past to Canada.”

While such people have the right to their democratic views, just as we tolerate those who want to break up Canada, we do not tolerate such views in parties that wish to govern the country, he said. When he was in government, his caucus understood this, he added.

There was a sense in the pointed nature of his message that he does not think this is the case now in Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party.

There are subtle signs of Sikh ascendancy.

Harper is said to have been asked by the Conservative campaign not to post any photos of himself and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during Harper’s visit to the sub-continent in February.

Hindus say they were upset by what they considered a 

weak response from Poilievre

(and Liberal Leader Mark Carney) to the murder of 25 mainly Hindu tourists in Jammu and Kashmir during the election. The terrorists, thought to be Pakistan-linked Islamists, reportedly asked their victims their religion before shooting them. Neither Canadian leader mentioned India or that the victims were predominantly Hindu in their responses

Sikhs now dominate positions of power in the Conservative party: Uppal is deputy leader, Jasraj Hallan is the finance critic, and Arpin Khanna led the party’s outreach effort during the election. (Khanna was previously the Ontario co-chair of Poilievre’s leadership campaign and was endorsed by the leader when he ran in a by-election in Oxford, Ont., to replace veteran Dave MacKenzie.)

Uppal and Khanna were responsible for reaching out to minority communities in the last election and their efforts left a heavy Sikh footprint.

Of 29 Indo-Canadian candidates appointed by the leader (or who ran in races where a leading contender was disqualified), it appears that 27 were Sikh. I tried to verify these numbers with Conservative party director of communications, Sarah Fischer and with Uppal, but neither replied by deadline.

In an interview with National Post, former two-time Conservative MP Devinder Shory asked rhetorically: “Could they not find any Christian, Muslim or Hindus from India?”

Former B.C. finance minister

Mike de Jong was a casualty of the strategy to back Sikh candidates

. He campaigned for a year to replace veteran Conservative MP Ed Fast in the B.C. riding of Abbotsford—South Langley. He had the backing of the riding association but days ahead of the federal campaign, he was told by the party that he was not approved to take part in the nomination contest because he was not qualified.

That race was eventually won by 25-year-old Sukman Gill, who went on to beat Liberal Kevin Gillies, as well as de Jong, who ran as an Independent.

This is the ultimate defence of appointing Sikhs: they tend to win. One Conservative veteran of outreach wars called the Sikh community “a vote-bank machine.”

The Indo-Canadian diaspora is split nearly 50/50 between Sikhs and Hindus, but the Sikh community is much more concentrated in a handful of ridings. There

are nine ridings in Canada where the Sikh population makes up more than 20 per cent

(including Surrey Newton in B.C., where it is over 50 per cent), according to the 2021 census. There are only two where Hindus account for more than one-fifth of the population.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were heavily criticized for pandering to the Sikh diaspora. Domestic politics were at least partly responsible for Trudeau’s decision to announce in the House of Commons in 2023 that Canada had

“credible evidence” of Indian government involvement

in the assassination of Khalistani activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Omer Aziz, a former Liberal foreign policy adviser to Trudeau, 

wrote in the Globe and Mail
 

afterward that Canada should have clamped down on Khalistani terror financing but “didn’t want to lose the Sikh vote to (then NDP leader) Jagmeet Singh, so we dug in our heels.”

The truth is that all parties woo Sikh voters and, at best, turn a blind eye to Khalistani sympathizers.

The tactic worked for the Conservatives in the 2025 election, at least on the surface. The party added six new Sikh MPs to the caucus: Amanpreet Singh Gill in Calgary Skyview, Dalwinder Gill in Calgary McKnight, Jagsharan Singh Mahal in Edmonton Southeast, Sukman Gill in Abbotsford—South Langley, Amarjeet Gill in Brampton West and Harb Gill in Windsor West.

But there are opportunity costs to every move.

Anecdotally, it seems that many Hindus stuck with the Liberals, despite being upset over Trudeau’s behaviour on India.

Amarjeet Gill’s victory in Brampton West was the only success for the Conservatives in a riding where Hindus represented more than 10 per cent of the population.

But the implications of the strategy are wider than winning a handful or ridings.

Hindu Conservatives like Shory suggest, while Harper “kept everything in balance,” the Sikhs in caucus are now driving policy and that Khalistani sympathies are an obstacle to improving relations with India.

“Some people get the impression that politicians in Canada have been hijacked by Khalistanis. People have the right to express their views, but politicians should not give radicals their support. Canada should be in the forefront,” the former MP said.

De Jong said that he doesn’t understand why Canadian politicians allow themselves to get wrapped up in tribal politics.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I just didn’t go to certain parades because I didn’t want to march in front of a float that

celebrated the assassination of an Indian prime minister

(Indira Gandhi),” he said.

Poilievre has been clear in his speeches that new arrivals should bring their culture and their traditions here, but not their homeland conflicts.

“If you come to Canada, you become a Canadian. You put Canada first. Leave your problems at the door,” Poilievre said.

But that is not a philosophy he has applied to his own party’s nominations.

The consequence is likely to be the perpetuation of what Harper called “unnecessary conflicts” with key partners like India.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

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Justice Renu Mandhane is one of Ontario’s foremost judicial activists, so it should surprise no one that she’ll stoop to using racism as a basis to let Black men off the hook for possessing illegal guns.

That’s what happened at the end of March in the case of

Robert Cameron

, who had been pulled over and detained for having outstanding drug charges and a suspended license, and whose car, in the process, was discovered to be illegally housing an unlicensed firearm.

The episode began when a Brampton police officer, Anand Gandhi, was notified by his cruiser’s licence plate scanner flagged a nearby Jeep for a week-long impound due to the owner’s active infractions. Given the pending charges, the officer called for backup just in case. He then approached Cameron’s Jeep, identified him, handcuffed him, patted him down, and sat him in the back of the police car.

“Officer Gandhi specifically denied treating the accused differently or handcuffing him behind his back because of the way he looked, i.e. because he was a Black man,” wrote the judge. “The officer maintained that it was his ‘common practice’ to handcuff and place suspended drivers in the back of his cruiser because it was a ‘safe place’ to speak with them.”

The judge noted that the officer had pulled over a woman earlier that day for driving on a medical suspension, but didn’t cuff her or keep her in the police car. Her car, however, was not being impounded, and she wasn’t said to have outstanding criminal charges.

After other officers arrived, the Jeep was searched for the alleged purpose of taking a pre-tow inventory. Some licence plates were found, which Cameron attributed to his girlfriend, as well as a gun, which was under a cargo mat covered by construction materials.

Mandhane didn’t outright state that the gun was loaded, but she did note that ammunition was photographed by an officer after the weapon was made “safe of any ammunition.”

The officer then placed Cameron under arrest for gun charges and attempted to help him reach his lawyer, who didn’t pick up; 15 or so minutes later, he asked Cameron if “everything in the vehicle” was his. (This, the Crown admitted, was an infringement of Cameron’s Charter right to speak to counsel.)

The other alleged rights infringements were less clear-cut. Cameron’s lawyer argued that he was unlawfully detained from the outset and that his car was subject to an unreasonable warrantless search, violating his respective Section 9 and 8 Charter rights. There is indeed precedent from the Supreme Court of Canada stating that it’s wrong to detain a motorist in a police car without necessity (in that case, the driver didn’t have outstanding drug charges)

—

but it’s

not enough to get evidence tossed

if the officer operates in good faith. The

Supreme Court of Canada

and the

Ontario Court of Appeal

have also permitted warrantless inventory searches of cars in the past, but those precedents were not applied here.

Ultimately, the judge emphatically agreed with defence, ruling that Cameron’s rights had been so severely violated that the evidence for his illegal possession of a (possibly loaded) gun was to be thrown out, rendering a firearms conviction impossible.

Why? Racism. Though Mandhane found “no direct evidence of racial profiling,” she nevertheless determined that Cameron’s treatment was “motivated in part by the fact that he is a Black man” — either the product of a lie or unconscious bias on the arresting officer’s part.

“Officer Gandhi’s decision has common indicia of racial profiling, namely, deviations from standard police practice (i.e. not using restraint when arresting or detaining), failing to assess the totality of the situation (i.e. not observing the lack of safety concerns or risk of absconding), and an insufficient non-discriminatory reasons for the treatment (i.e. resort to ‘common practice’).”

Cameron’s detention was largely a problem, Mandhane wrote, because he was handcuffed within two minutes of meeting the officer, and before the officer confirmed any suspensions in the police database.

“The only available inference is that Officer Gandhi subjected the accused to an arbitrary detention in part because he was Black,” figured the judge. While he accepted that the officer didn’t believe he was treating Cameron differently due to race, she found that “he was influenced by his unconscious racial biases when deciding how to treat the accused.”

The search, too, was tainted. Mandhane noted a few brief points throughout the arrest where the arresting officer turned off his microphone to speak to the other officers (at the time, policy was unclear as to whether that was correct protocol, though it’s since been clarified in Ontario that mics must stay on). Here, she guessed that the officer muted his microphone to express that he “suspected that the accused might have drugs in the Jeep.”

This, Mandhane continued, was evidence that the search of the car was “tainted by racial bias” because the officer “formed the intention to search the Jeep for evidence of criminal activity immediately after learning that the driver was a Black man. This is the only logical explanation.”

After filling in all unknown variables with the explanation of racism, the judge determined that the officer “assumed that the accused was more dangerous than other suspended drivers because he was Black,” that his “unconscious bias led him to exercise his discretion in favour of arresting and detaining the accused … for 90 minutes,” and that he “relied on stereotypes about Black people being more prone to criminality to illegally search his Jeep.”

It’s one thing to drop evidence because of obscenely racist police conduct — but here, so much of the judge’s reasoning simply came down to Cameron’s identity and conducting the equivalent of a palm-read to diagnose the arresting officer with untreated racism. Really, it’s Mandhane whose beliefs should be in question, as she has stated plainly for the record that race is one of her major considerations in deciding whether an individual’s rights were violated, and whether to throw out any evidence that could incriminate them.

This was likely the expectation when Justin Trudeau appointed Mandhane to her post in 2020. In the past, she invented a whole new category of lawsuit — the tort of family violence — to make a political

show

of her court’s disdain for family violence. Because there already exist a number of different types of lawsuits that encompass spousal and child abuse, her move was completely unnecessary (and indeed inappropriate, given her position as an unelected judge).

Prior to that, as the Ontario Human Rights commissioner, she

wrote

that Ontario’s public service was systematically racist because its demographics don’t perfectly reflect those of the Ontario population. In that office, one of her

focus causes

was the

elimination of racial profiling

in Ontario, which she considered a proven phenomenon due to police statistics showing that Black and Indigenous youth were being disproportionately stopped by police (while not engaging with the fact that some groups commit more crimes, and are

more likely

to populate the ranks of Toronto’s most wanted).

So, faced with a Black man’s active drug charges and illegal perhaps-loaded gun, this judge took issue not with the objective threat of a dangerous unauthorized weapon, but the racism she imagined into the entire scenario as part of her greater quest to cement racial thinking into the Canadian justice system.

“The short-term gains that flow from racial profiling in terms of police investigations and evidence-gathering cannot overshadow the intergenerational trauma that anti-Black racism in policing causes and the social ills it perpetuates,” concluded Mandhane. If that’s the cost of safety in Brampton, she seems to say, then so be it.

National Post

This summer, the Ontario government will remove the box that has, for several years, concealed the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park. It was in 2020 — after several statues across Canada had been painted, toppled and even beheaded — that Macdonald’s likeness in Ontario’s capital was boarded up.

Uncovering the statue is a welcome move. But if that’s all we do, we are likely to find ourselves back here again before long. Until Canadians are willing to revisit the actual historical facts — and in particular Macdonald’s relationship with Indigenous-Canadians — the cycle of erasure and outrage will continue.

The most widespread and damaging misunderstanding is the idea that every Indigenous child was forced by law to attend a residential school, was taken far from home, kept for years and subjected to routine abuse. This narrative has become almost universally accepted in Canada.

However, the reality is that, in many years, the majority of Indigenous children who attended school went to day schools and most of the students dropped out after Grade 1, whether at day or residential schools. These facts were well known at the time. They were discussed in Parliament and reported in mainstream newspapers.

For example, in 1946, decades after the first residential schools were built, the Globe and Mail reported that, “Of the 128,000 Indians in this country, only 16,000 last year received formal schooling. Of this number, few stayed more than a year and only 71 … reached Grade 9.”

A populist movement towards compulsory education had begun in the 1870s in Canada; by the 1940s, most Canadian children were required to attend school till at least age 15. However, the government in Macdonald’s day, and through many subsequent prime ministers, respected the wishes of Indigenous families, who were not forced to keep their children in school beyond the early grades.

Clearly, neither Macdonald’s government, nor any succeeding one, was engaged in genocide, cultural or otherwise. There were also a number of initiatives of Macdonald’s governments that likely saved tens of thousands of Indigenous lives and are equally inconsistent with the notion that he had any interest in genocide.

Smallpox killed thousands of Indigenous people in Canada in some pre-Confederation years and Macdonald’s governments, in the colonial era, and later when he was prime minister, ran programs to ensure that every Indigenous person in Canada, no matter how remote their location, was vaccinated against it, thus ending the threat.

Similarly, when the buffalo population collapsed, Macdonald immediately initiated what was certainly the largest famine relief operation in Canadian history. Moving supplies across the county when no railway existed was an enormous undertaking, and it had the usual missteps associated with a hastily organized program of this scale. However, the program likely saved thousands of lives and avoided a human catastrophe across western Canada.

A stark difference between the Canadian settlement experience and that of the Americans is the absence of war. The Americans fought a series of “Indian wars” over a period of over a century in which tens of thousands of people died.

Macdonald was determined to avoid such bloodshed. His government’s policy was to ensure that treaties were signed and in place before allowing widespread settlement in western Canada.

Finally, his government created the North West Mounted Police to protect the legal rights of both Indigenous people and settlers, and to deter incursions from the United States. As the famous Siksika Chief Isapo-muxika stated in 1877: “The Mounted Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” As a result, there were no deaths in Indian wars in Canada.

None of this means we must idolize Macdonald. But tearing down or boxing up his statue doesn’t just erase a man, it erases our shared memory and history. Statues are not about sainthood. They are about significance and shared challenges that have been overcome. Macdonald led Canada into existence. He held it together through rebellion, war and economic depression.

The reappearance of his statue at Queen’s Park is not the end of the conversation. It should be the beginning, with a plaque that tells the truth — good and bad — and with school curricula that examine his record in full. We can’t build a better country by forgetting the people and the blood, sweat and tears that got us to this point.

National Post

Greg Piasetzki is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation and an intellectual property rights lawyer in Toronto. He contributed a chapter on Sir John A Macdonald to “The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.”

• FIRST READING: Restored John A. Macdonald statue could be beginning of the end for history purge
• Greg Piasetzki: John A. Macdonald saved more Indigenous lives than any other prime minister