About 98 per cent of government executives took a bonus last year even though departments missed nearly half of their performance targets, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“Why are most government executives rewarding themselves with bonus cheques when their departments can barely pass their own tests?” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Bonuses are supposed to be for doing a good job, but bureaucrats are handing them out like participation ribbons.

“And what does a government executive have to do to miss a bonus?”

Government executives took about $201 million in bonuses in 2024-25, which is the government’s last full budget year.

About 98 per cent of all government executives took a bonus last year.

Meanwhile, federal departments met just 54 per cent of their performance targets, according to the government's own data.

The government hands out multiple different bonuses to executives each year, including a “bilingual bonus,” a “performance award,” “at risk pay,” “performance pay,” among others, according to the records.

The federal government has continued to shower its employees with taxpayer-funded bonuses despite poor performance.

Federal bonuses have cost taxpayers about $2 billion since 2015. The government has continued to rubberstamp annual bonuses even though “less than 50 per cent of [performance] targets are consistently met within the same year,” according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

“We end up in a situation where it is public servants responsible for delivering programs that set their own targets and they usually set the bar not too high so it doesn’t look too easy, but neither too low so it’s fairly easy to achieve most of the time,” said former PBO Yves Giroux. “Yet by their own assessment they fail to deliver on many of these.”

The federal government publishes its own data summarizing department performance results for the past five years. In two of those years, departments failed to meet half of their own targets. Their best year was 2024-25, when departments met less than 54 per cent of their own targets.

“The government is broke and taxpayers can’t afford to bankroll big bonus cheques each and every year for highly paid government executives,” Terrazzano said. “The government needs to stop rewarding failure with taxpayers’ money.”

The government has continued to rubberstamp bonuses despite soaring federal spending and debt.

The federal government is borrowing about $78 billion this year.

The government must shrink its ballooning bureaucracy to fix its finances. That’s because the federal bureaucracy consumes about 54 per cent of the government’s day-to-day operating spending.

The federal government added 99,000 employees and increased the cost of the bureaucracy 80 per cent over the decade.

The bigger bills haven’t improved performance.

Half of Canadians say federal services have gotten worse since 2016 even with the massive increase in the federal bureaucracy, according to a Leger poll. The poll also found that 54 per cent of Canadians want the government to cut the size and cost of its bureaucracy.

“More government bureaucrats taking more money from taxpayers hasn’t resulted in better services for Canadians,” Terrazzano said. “Taxpayers need Prime Minister Mark Carney to take urgent action and significantly cut the size and cost of the bureaucracy now.”