The Bureaucratic Party of Canada

Welcome to the Matrix, where the real power isn’t in elected hands—it’s in the unelected ones writing the rules you never voted for.

The “Bureaucratic Party of Canada” is now by far the largest, best-organized, most well-financed, and most influential political party in the country. It has by far the most active members and best media connections.

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Game of Forms

Over the past decade, Canada’s federal civil service - and its municipal and provincial country cousins - has grown by more than 40% in size and cost—far outpacing both population growth and private-sector employment and is shadowed by a similar increase in responsibility obscuring contractors and cover-fire producing consultants despite promises to bring this into check. This expansion, partly justified by government intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic, has not reversed even as those emergency programs wound down. Instead, it has entrenched a bloated, inefficient, and self-sustaining bureaucracy that seems more focused on growing itself than serving the public. There seems to be nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

But the problem isn’t just size—it’s quality and structure. No one wants to work on the front lines, where services are actually delivered, nor at the top, where responsibility is potentially public and scrutiny is high. Instead, the real growth has occurred in the fat middle layers of bureaucracy—policy analysts, administrators, and internal strategists—multiplying in government offices while service delivery lags further behind or disappears altogether behind website walls and portals.

The literalness of frontline avoidance is striking. Canada’s Armed Forces are in a recruitment crisis, struggling to fill frontline roles, yet the number of civilian defense policy analysts continues to balloon. The healthcare system faces critical staff shortages and increasing patient dissatisfaction, but bureaucratic oversight and middle management in health departments expand unchecked. Veterans wait for benefits. Passports are delayed. Immigration oversight is so bad the government was forced to admit it didn’t know how many are actually coming and going. Meanwhile, the number of government employees drafting reports, forming committees, and writing policies continues to surge.

This structural dysfunction has created a self-serving and insular bureaucracy, one where accountability is low, responsibility is diffuse, and inefficiency is rewarded. Public-sector wages and benefits have skyrocketed, widening the economic divide between government workers and the private-sector taxpayers who fund them.

Nowhere is the bureaucracy’s usurping of power and vexing democracy’s purpose more publicly apparent than in the public consultation process itself. Once a tool to engage and empower citizens, public consultation has been transformed into an instrument of delay, power, and control in the hands of middle management. Rather than making government more responsive, it has become a barrier—designed to frustrate, exhaust, and alienate interested citizens, leaving them feeling more unheard than if there had been no process at all. Worse, consultations are frequently used to end-run around elected representatives, cutting them out of decision-making and allowing bureaucrats to justify and slow-walk preordained outcomes as the “will of the public.”

While officials - literally elected to represent the public - stand by, impotent and shrugged into irrelevance, the public consultation charade rolls on—a Potemkin process designed to mimic democracy while strangling it. This bureaucratic Kabuki launders and slow walks predetermined outcomes, drowning real representation in a flood of specious surveys, tokenistic town halls, and ridiculous reports. It is not consultation. It is social control. The result is always the same: more study, more review, more obfuscation of purpose and responsibility.

Instead of solving problems, the bureaucracy manufactures endless complexity, ensuring its own growth while making government more distant and impenetrable to the people it claims to serve. Like the old lobster fisherman who never admitted a good catch, the bureaucrat is always acting overburdened with never enough help or support to get by - citing their failures as proof that more bureaucracy is desperately needed.

Much like the mystagogic medieval monasteries that grew rich and powerful while losing touch with their purpose, Canada’s civil service has become an entrenched aristocracy—one that thrives within its own byzantine bureaucratic maze while the people it was designed to serve are left navigating a broken system. With mounting deficits, economic pressures, and just plain observation of how the whole system sucks, many people are plainly asking: What’s the point of this machine that no longer works for the public?

Canada’s Real Ruling Class Isn’t Elected

The real divide in Canadian society isn’t between left and right, rich and poor, or any of the other identity-based categories politicians and activists obsess over today. It is the chasm between the government worker and the non-governmental citizen—a separation so vast that it shapes nearly every political and economic reality in the country.

Unlike those in the private sector, government employees enjoy a level of security, benefits, and insulation from consequence that no ordinary worker could dream of. Layoffs are unheard of. Performance reviews are meaningless. Pensions are generous beyond reason. Holidays, perks, and benefits stretch far beyond what struggling small businesses or private-sector workers could ever afford. And in the rare instance when accountability is demanded, the entire system bends to protect its own. While private citizens navigate uncertainty, competition, and market forces, government workers exist in a world where failure is rewarded with budget increases and incompetence is shielded by layers of bureaucracy.

This cloistered monastic world has profound consequences for governance itself. The nature of civil service employment has severed government workers from the everyday concerns of the people they ostensibly serve. They do not experience the tax burdens they impose, the regulatory nightmares they create, or the real-world consequences of their inefficiencies. Instead, they exist in a protected class, writing rules for a reality they do not inhabit. And when they retire—still drawing from the taxpayer, now with an even greater sense of detachment—they become an untouchable elite, permanently removed from the struggles of ordinary life but with the time, influence, and resources to shape it. This is not just an economic inefficiency; it is an existential problem. A governing class that no longer lives among the governed does not—and cannot—govern in their interest. It is perhaps the greatest misallocation of human resources in history, where the most privileged segment of society exists to expand its own power at the expense of those who actually keep the country running and create the wealth they squander.

Yet many Canadians still accept or perpetuate the myth that the bureaucracy is non-political, merely carrying out policy rather than creating it, while even the most brief peak in the door at a city council meeting would easily reveal they are an activist political party with simple guiding principles:

Principle One – that every public issue and challenge is to be answered with expansion and expenditure of government along with its utopia of rules.

Principle Two - that government expenditures, to be spent through and by government, must always increase regardless of whether or not there are sufficient revenues to cover them.

Principle Three  - there is no limit to the increasing of taxation, regulation, public monopolization, and the depersonalization of public services while avoiding any responsibility for outcomes and sustaining growth within the bureaucratic party organization.

Unaccountable, Unnamable, Unfireable, the bureaucrats, in their legion can come at each day well rested and armed with the respect, and jargon, of their professional office, ready to crush any citizen or elected representative who does not suit their purpose. The bureaucrat's ultimate weapons are false complexity, worry (because the worried are most easily led), and time itself, which is perhaps, Godlike, their ultimate weapon.

The Resistance

Should we just accept this bureaucracy without limits as inevitable? Where does the passive acceptance of endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from?

However bombastic all this may seem, I am not outside the mainstream of thought in my complaint. I am not alone in this view. Some of the greatest thinkers and writers in history—those most attuned to the fragility of democracy—have warned of the bureaucratic cancer that consumes free societies from within. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, foresaw a creeping administrative state that would smother civic life under a “network of small, complicated rules.” Max Weber warned of the “iron cage” of bureaucracy, where faceless institutions replace human judgment with soulless procedure. Ludwig von Mises called it the great enemy of progress, a force that exists only to sustain itself, indifferent to the public good. George Orwell depicted it as a tool of control, a machine that renders individuals powerless under its labyrinthine rules. C.S. Lewis cautioned that the “worst of all tyrannies” would be imposed not by dictators, but by bureaucrats claiming to act for the public’s good.

Fiction has echoed these warnings with terrifying precision. Franz Kafka, in The Trial and The Castle, showed the nightmarish absurdity of a system where the individual is ensnared in endless paperwork and shifting rules, never knowing who is in charge. Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, exposed the self-perpetuating insanity of bureaucratic logic, where survival depends on navigating rules designed to be inescapable. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, illustrated how a technocratic state pacifies the masses not with oppression, but with an all-encompassing bureaucracy that removes the very possibility of resistance. Even in Canada, Robertson Davies often satirized the pettiness and inertia of bureaucratic institutions, while Pierre Berton chronicled the government’s bureaucratic bungling in The National Dream, showing how red tape nearly choked Canada’s greatest infrastructure project. From every angle—political, economic, literary—the verdict is the same: bureaucracy, left unchecked, does not serve democracy; it consumes it.

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The Situation - Too Big, Too Much, Too Powerful

If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have bureaucracy setting policy rather than carrying it out, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?

If the people cannot vote and have their will be directed by their elected representatives through the machinery of government, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. It's incredibly important that we fix that feedback loop, and that the public's elected representatives decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy. We cannot allow a bureaucracy to grow so powerful, and a representative government so weak, that elected officials—once in office and out of public view—become little more than shop stewards for the bureaucracy. Instead of holding it accountable, they end up promoting and enforcing its agenda onto the people, rather than representing the will of the people to the bureaucracy, as democracy intends.

This is not to say that there are not good people who are in the federal, provincial, or local bureaucracy, but you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people.

Groupthink erodes the self-awareness of bureaucracy, creating an insular culture where internal consensus is mistaken for objective reality. When officials operate in an environment that discourages dissent and rewards conformity, they lose the ability to critically evaluate their own role in governance. This lack of introspection allows the bureaucracy to see any challenge to its power—not as an opportunity for reform or efficiency—but as an existential threat. As a result, rather than adapting to serve the public more effectively, bureaucracies reflexively resist change, entrenching themselves further through regulatory expansion, procedural complexity, and alliances with sympathetic political actors. This self-preservation instinct, masked as expertise or necessity, fuels unchecked growth, making the bureaucracy increasingly unaccountable to the people it was designed to serve. Without external pressure or meaningful oversight, it becomes a self-sustaining machine, protecting itself at the expense of democratic governance.

That's the whole point of a democracy. We need a good bureaucracy as much as we need good citizens and good elected representatives. We can’t have this unelected, fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative or citizen. It's just something we’ve got to fix.

Many of the problems of the day and concerns of all citizens are actually symptoms of the metastasized bureaucracy and the utopia of rules that is its fortress.

An obvious example is the debt. We are using long-term debt, a burden on the rising generation unprecedented in history, to finance, not investments in some great project or purpose, but simply to pay the day-to-day salaries of the most inefficient and least productive workforce in history. It is quite possibly the largest and most long-term waste of resources and human capacity ever known to human experience.

It's really astounding that the interest payments alone on the national debt double the Defense Department budget, which is shocking because we spend a lot of money on defense. It is nearly equal to our federal healthcare spending.

There are ways to rationalize debt: comparing it to rising GDP… a flawed calculus, saying the federal debt has a different meaning from household debt because it can print money, or comparing ourselves to other even more indebted times and places. But the simple comparisons give us the best picture of the situation. It’s more than we spend on housing and environmental issues combined. It’s essential to bring this bureaucracy into check. It’s essential to keep the institutions and structure of democracy in working order. It's essential for Canada and Canadians to have the resources necessary to live the good life that we’ve earned, to provide for the weakest and most vulnerable among us to raise them up, and to build great projects for the future, not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt.

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Westworld - The System’s Self-Preservation

The TV series Westworld speaks to the overwhelming power of bureaucracy in several ways, particularly through its depiction of systems that perpetuate themselves, control individuals, and resist meaningful change. Our lives are shaped by the systems in which we live. It’s a common concern underlying Sci-Fi stories, but at what point is it a real thing? And at what point should we be worried?

At some point, we will reach a critical mass where the bureaucracy becomes self-aware in a way that will actively influence elections that threaten its growth. It sounds like sci-fi horror, but it is the simple-mindedness of groupthink that puts us in existential danger. The bureaucratic mind would rather rule over the ruble of the nation than check its own growth and power.

Nearly 70 years ago Admiral HG Rickover wrote, “A major reason why so large a majority is smugly docile is that it has accepted the unwritten rules of the game: Don't rock the boat as long as you get your cut. Why become worked up over corruption as long as there are enough benefits of the fallout to go around? Once the acceptance of corruption becomes sufficiently widespread, effective exposure seems threatening to too many people and interests. Clamor for closing loopholes declines in direct proportion to the number of people who benefit from loopholes of their own.”

The enemy is a person who has total willingness to delegate his worries about the world to officialdom. He assumes that only the people in authority are in a position to know and act. He believes that if vital information essential to the making of public decisions is withheld, it can only be for a good reason. If a problem is wholly or partially bureaucratic in nature, he will ask no questions even though the consequences of the problem are cultural, political, or social.

Nothing to bureaucracy is less important than the shape of things to come or the needs of the next generation. Talk of the legacy of the past or of human destiny leaves the bureaucracy cold. Historically, they are disconnected.

The Coming Elections

When Canadians mark their ballots in upcoming federal elections, they’re engaging in what seems like a simple act of civic duty. But increasingly they’re not just selecting a representative, they’re hiring a crisis manager to get into the ring with an immense heavyweight unyielding bureaucracy.

The lifecycle of an elected representative is tragic. You either die a reformer or live long enough to become part of the problem. – A bad politician is one who starts out as a well-intentioned politician and eventually becomes a spokesperson for the bureaucracy.

The one thing we know about the mandate of the next government is that it will be to do things differently than the way they had been done before. Four More Years of The Same, is not a winning election slogan. Their job will be to manage CHANGE - to lead 365,000+ workers and an army of consultants and contractors who've all been doing things one way for the past five, nine, or even whole careers, and ask them to do it a different way.

Change management is the most difficult part of leadership.

Imagine a scenario: the fresh federal government of whatever political stripe comes to power with a clear majority mandate — it’s democracy at work – say a majority team of 200 out of 338 parliamentary seats. This team of 200 might as well be the Greek Spartan 300. They’re tasked with not just governance but leadership over a colossal federal workforce of over 365,000 — a workforce defined by the procedures and practices of previous governments and their own internal policies, ideology, and inertia.

Most voters believe they’re electing change. Yet, what’s hard to grasp from the outside is the Sisyphean nature of the job they're assigning to their preferred candidate - most often an average, but likable person, of middling skills and experience often in areas not readily transferable to the job of Change Management. This isn't just about legislating; it's about managing people — a lot of them.

 The Composition of the Public Service

The Canadian federal public service has grown beyond anything ever imagined in the history of government. It has tripled in size in the last 25 years; growing by 100,000 in the last ten years - over 40%. Adding the provincial and municipal governments plus all the near-government, contractors, agencies, boards, and commissions more than doubles that again.

Note both the growth over the last ten years - out of all proportion with any changes in the country, and the valley in the late ‘90’s, the Chrétien years, that show this work can be done.

Consider the breakdown of the 365,000:

- 50% of these employees probably see their roles as just jobs. To them, work is a means to an end, not a mission.

- 25% might be competent and enthusiastic allies, waiting eagerly for change and a chance to innovate and help, that they have hoped for as much as the electorate.

- 20% could be incompetent. Every organization has its share but the government has unique features of unfirability, labyrinthian systems, and the Peter Principle along with public sector union protection that make even the worst slackers difficult to dismiss.

- But the final 5% are potentially of most concern. They could be ideologically opposed, rogue, rip-off artists, or simply power-hungry, enlarging their bureaucratic turf at every opportunity.

For our elected 200, this means directly managing 180,000 people who might not care much about the new mission; attempting to rally and inspire 90,000 helpers. or potential allies who are scattered and need leadership; while working with 72,000 who were part of the problem that got the last government fired; and dealing with at least 18,000 actively undermining gremlins in the works.

And one thing is for sure. We’re no cheerleaders. None of the elected representatives are going to get much support from us. We’re just waiting until the opposition catches one of them saying a wrong word so we can perform the moment of outrage that signals our virtue and indicates how engaged we are.

How is that possibly going to work out?

 The Real Opposition

It’s not the other political parties that present the main opposition. It's the bureaucratic behemoth. These officials, having accrued power and autonomy over years, now present a formidable challenge to any significant change. They are the unseen counterforce to Parliament – unnamed, unaccountable, unfirable, and largely unknown.

How bad is it?

Right here at home THE COAST, yes, The Coast, that media bastion of all things artsy and open, is raising the red flag not for workers to unite, but to share that our municipal bureaucracy problems have reached critical. Channeling Kafka, Huxley, Orwell, and Heller, The Coast is sending weekly reports from the frontline at City Hall such as this from last month...

"One of the most important things revealed at Tuesday’s council meeting, although it slipped by pretty quietly under all the headlines about the death of the Windsor Street Exchange, was the extent to which staff in the city's bureaucracy are undermining the will of council and the integrity of our municipal democracy."

As one of the last media voices to actually attend these city hall meetings and reporting, it’s worth reading just to keep informed about a very local crisis in government.

 A Nova Scotian Lesson

We must hire the right representatives for the job and make their mission clear. Such was Nova Scotia’s hope with its first NDP government. The majority agreed. The time had come. The NDP had grown to maturity and built a likable team of friendly faces. The public sector, habituated to alternating PC and Liberal leadership, resisted vehemently. The result? A governance quagmire, proving that even with a strong mandate, the NDP caucus discovered steering the public service is like sailing the Titanic through a sea made of Caramilk bars.

 The Voter’s Dilemma

The tragedy is that while the electorate seeks to install leaders who can effect change, they often end up choosing based on charm or party loyalty rather than the capability to manage change in large organizations effectively. I don't think when most people go out to vote they understand they are effectively hiring people to do a job. They vote for the nicest, the tallest, the most polished, or the best salesperson. The person with whom they are in most agreement. Or worse, they just vote for whoever "their team" puts forward. The most well-educated candidates probably went to business school. But a business school is not a school of government. This is very specialized work - translating the voter’s will into a mandate and convincing the bureaucracy to carry out the work required to achieve that mandate.

The result? Leaders - citizen representatives - who are uniquely ill-prepared to handle the true nature of their roles face staggering armies, with little support, and an astonishing lack of commitment from the homefront that sent them to the battle.

The poor people elected are uniquely ill-equipped for the new job of government. The opposition isn't the other parties or competing ideas. It's the opposition of officialdom. Now it has grown out of proportion and power from anything ever seen in the history of the world. And that includes the command economy communist states. It's fundamentally changed what democracy is and how it can work.

Our small l liberal politicians. The good guys. the nice people we've been voting for in Canada for 100 years have to hoist this in along with their supporters and parties. The job is to bring the permanent government into check, make it change from the government, systems, and ideas that were voted out, and make it perform the new mandate. It's not a job for the faint of heart.

 We Need A Rethink

What's the solution? If we want change we can’t simply change the team’s coaches for another group of more likeable folks. We have to choose people who can make change happen and empower them to work.  If we want any change at any pace we have to accept some messy work. Democracy is an argument we have with ourselves and it is never settled. Reforms — slashing bureaucratic layers, eliminating redundant agencies, clearing out the least helpful and actively undermining bureaucrats while breaking down siloes and decentralizing power has not been done for generations. But that’s the easy part. More challenging yet, is changing the very culture of the public sector from one of entitlement and inertia to one of dynamism and accountability.

 What’s Next

Democracy as we know it is evolving. We live in the oldest and most mature democracy in history. No government has ever faced such a mountainous challenge. As bureaucratic bloat alters the landscape of governance, the role of our elected officials becomes increasingly complex and misunderstood.

It’s a Herculean task, demanding not just political acumen but profound Change Management skills. And it requires the kind of support for our elected representatives, at all levels of government,  not seen in generations.

As voters, it’s crucial to understand the magnitude of what we ask of those we elect. Only then can we hope to choose leaders who are truly up to the task of bringing the behemoth that the government bureaucracy has become into check.

Related: The Nature Of Bureaucracy

1. Bureaucracy is Unavoidable in Government but Should Be Limited

We need bureaucracy. It is the labour force, infrastructure, systems, and tools with which our elected representatives carry out the mandates we give them. Some bureaucracy is necessary for essential state functions (e.g., law enforcement, courts). However, when bureaucratic principles spread into economic and personal life, they suffocate initiative and progress.

2. Bureaucratic Management

Bureaucratic Management (Government) – Operates by rigid rules and political directives, not efficiency or consumer preference. It lacks a clear profit-and-loss signal, leading to waste and inefficiency.

3. Bureaucracy is Inherently Inefficient

Without market competition, bureaucrats have no incentive to improve services or reduce costs. By nature unaccountable, unfireable, and unnamed, their success is measured by rule-following and budget expansion rather than productivity or outcomes.

4. The Incentives of Bureaucracy Encourage Growth, Not Service

Bureaucrats benefit from more rules, more regulations, and more employees under their command. Unlike private businesses, which shrink or close when they fail, bureaucracies justify their failures by demanding more funding and power. Unlike any other enterprise, failure is seen as proof the system needs more respect, more money, more people, and more time.

5. Bureaucracy Undermines Democracy and Individual Liberty

A large bureaucratic state shifts power away from elected representatives and into the hands of unelected officials from the lowly bitter button pusher to the wealthiest and most distant of the elite management class. Citizens are increasingly governed by rules they didn’t vote for and by bureaucrats who are nearly impossible to remove. Bureaucracy turns the government from a servant of the people into a master that dictates how people live.

6. Bureaucracy Crushes Innovation and Personal Responsibility

Entrepreneurship and creativity thrive in a system that rewards creativity, risk-taking, and efficiency. The future is built from these pillars. Bureaucracy, by contrast, discourages independent thinking, preferring conformity and compliance. There must be a balance between these two things that is firmly in the control of the citizenry.

Over time, people working under bureaucratic systems adopt a mindset of dependency, following rules instead of solving problems.

7. Bureaucracy Leads to Socialism by Default

As bureaucracy expands, it increasingly replaces free-market decision-making with government control. This creates a creeping form of unintentional socialism where the state, not citizens or the market, allocates resources and dictates economic outcomes.

Once entrenched, this process is difficult to reverse because bureaucracies fight to protect their existence.

A Call for Limited Government

While some government and bureaucracy is natural, needed, good and necessary, its functions should be strictly limited to prevent bureaucratic overreach. A free society thrives when creative ideas and markets, not bureaucracies, drive economic and social progress. The more power we give to bureaucrats, the harder it becomes to reclaim individual and economic freedom.

Unchecked bureaucratic growth as we have experienced over the last ten years on an unprecedented scale, leads to inefficiency, oppression, and a gradual erosion of democracy.

We can fix this. The next government can repeat what Jean Chretien’s government accomplished in the late 90’s. And the next government after that can repeat the process pushing a coddled and leisure-addled lost generation workforce back into productive and purposeful work to help shape, what Charles Eisenstein poetically calls The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.