Federal government executives collected nearly $202 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses last year even though departments met barely half of their own performance targets, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.The CTF said federal executives received $201.5 million in bonuses in 2025, while government data shows departments achieved just 54% of their performance targets during the 2024-25 fiscal year."Bonuses are for when you go above and beyond, so why are most government executives taking bonuses every year when their departments can barely pass their own test?" said CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano. "Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to end Ottawa's entitlement culture because federal executives shouldn't automatically get a bonus."According to Public Services and Procurement Canada, about 88% of federal executives received a bonus in 2025.The records show executives can receive multiple forms of additional compensation, including bilingual bonuses, performance awards, at-risk pay and performance pay.Former parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux questioned the government's performance measurement system, noting departments establish their own benchmarks."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," Giroux said. "Yet by their own assessment they fail to deliver on many of these."The CTF estimates federal executive bonuses have cost taxpayers about $2 billion since 2015."You shouldn't get a bonus when you write the questions for your own test and still get a D-," Terrazzano said. "Taxpayers can't afford to pay for a battalion of bureaucrats rubberstamping bonuses for each other.".The taxpayer advocacy group also highlighted bonus payments at several federal Crown corporations despite financial or operational challenges.Canada Post, which reported nearly $1.6 billion in losses in 2025 and received a $1-billion taxpayer bailout, approved $30.8 million in bonuses last year.The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation distributed $31.7 million in bonuses even as its CEO acknowledged housing supply and affordability remained among Canada's biggest challenges.VIA Rail paid out $10.3 million in bonuses, with every executive receiving additional compensation. The average executive bonus totalled $115,293 despite the Crown corporation continuing to post annual losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Alto, the Crown corporation overseeing the federal government's proposed high-speed rail project, distributed $2.8 million in bonuses. According to the CTF, every Alto employee received a bonus even though construction remains years away and the corporation has yet to finalize the project's route.The report comes as Prime Minister Mark Carney has repeatedly pledged his government would "spend less."However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer projects the federal bureaucracy will cost taxpayers more this year than during former prime minister Justin Trudeau's final year in office in 2024-25, even after adjusting for inflation."The government is more than $1 trillion in debt and Carney promised to find savings so these taxpayer-funded bonuses should be the first thing on the chopping block," Terrazzano said. "The government needs to stop rewarding failure with taxpayers' money."
