Carson Binda: A bureaucratic class is crushing British Columbia

Cutting only three per cent of government employees is not a solution to fix the bloated monster that has become B.C.’s bureaucracy.

(The British Columbia Parliament Buildings in Victoria, B.C.)

British Columbia’s government isn’t just spending too much money. It’s creating a bureaucratic class that is smothering taxpayers.

And that bloated bureaucracy has a voracious appetite for your tax dollars. It’s a system where incentives are turned upside down and failure is rewarded.

The state, and by extension its bureaucracy, is “parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it,” wrote economist Murray Rothbard in Anatomy of the State.

The bureaucracy has a parasitic relationship with the private sector in that the private sector creates wealth and the bureaucracy taxes it. The bureaucracy cannot exist without the private sector and its economy.

As the bureaucracy grows, so does its appetite for private sector dollars.

“In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply,” Rothbard wrote.

That’s the core of the problem we’re facing in B.C. That’s because every extra bureaucrat moving money around means one less wealth creator in the province.

You don’t have to be a libertarian to see that the bureaucratic class has grown faster than taxpayers can sustain. Even the provincial government admits that bureaucratic bloat has “significantly outpaced economic growth and general population growth.”

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the core government ministries. Ministerial staff numbered 27,000 bureaucrats in 2016-17. That number has now ballooned to 37,500 — a 39 per cent increase. This is the bureaucratic class: Victoria paper pushers, not firefighters, teachers or nurses.

A big bureaucracy with an even bigger appetite for taxpayer dollars is eating away at the private sector. The government has increased costs for families and businesses to pay for a bureaucracy that’s bigger than we need and bigger than we can afford.

Just take a look at the province’s latest budget.

Compensation for all provincial government employees will cost taxpayers $55.7 billion in 2026-27. For context, the province plans on spending $98.8 billion this year, meaning compensation for government employees makes up about 56 per cent of the provincial budget.

Every one per cent pay raise across the government sector costs taxpayers $557 million, about $98 per British Columbian. And Premier David Eby has been handing out big pay raises.

The B.C. General Employees Union, the largest union for B.C. government employees, is taking three per cent pay raises every year until at least 2028.

Eby plans to pay for those raises by shackling the productive sector of the economy with an even more unsustainable tax burden.

A clear example is his provincial sales tax expansion.

The Premier is expanding the seven per cent PST to a range of traditionally exempt services. Accountants, architects, engineers and security guards will all be slapped with the PST moving forward. That change will see bureaucrats take $261 million from the productive sector of the economy this year. Next year it will remove $530 million from the productive sector.

One reason businesses have to invest in security is because the government has failed in one of its core functions — protecting businesses from criminals and shoplifters. A recent survey found that 90 per cent of B.C. businesses believe that repeated, non-violent crime (theft, vandalism and break-ins) has a moderate to very significant impact locally. Some businesses and the jobs they bring have left altogether, explicitly citing “unsustainable” theft and violence against staff.

The provincial bureaucracy and politicians have allowed criminals to rob stores and now they are taxing businesses forced to protect themselves. Businesses already pay taxes so the state can protect them from bad actors. The province has abandoned that mission and then adds insult to injury by taxing businesses who hire outside help.

In the productive sector of the economy, failure is punished with layoffs, pay cuts and closed factory floors. Millions of choices and financial transactions by consumers punish bad businesses and reward productive ones.

But B.C.’s government has inverted that incentive structure and instead of punishing bad bureaucracies, our politicians reward them with taxpayer bailouts.

PavCo, a provincial Crown corporation that owns and operates B.C. Place stadium and the Vancouver Convention Centre, illustrates this point.

Despite holding some of the biggest sporting and cultural events in the world, the bureaucrats who run B.C. Place are reliant on multi-million dollar taxpayer handouts to keep the doors open. PavCo receives millions in bailouts from taxpayers to cover operational expenses every year, on top of tens of millions worth of annual infrastructure costs.

The anchor tenant of the stadium, the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer club, has repeatedly sounded the alarm about “challenges,” in dealing with the bureaucratic managers of the stadium. Now that anchor tenant has entered negotiations to leave B.C. Place altogether.

Because of the bureaucrats at PavCo, the Whitecaps have faced the worst revenue in their league, despite having among the best attendance at games.

In the productive sector of the economy, managers and bosses would be punished for overseeing a failing enterprise like B.C. Place. But the opposite is true with the bureaucracy.

PavCo President and CEO Ken Cretney made $431,000 in 2025. He’s taken a nearly 10 per cent pay raise in the past two years, up from $394,000 in 2023, according to proactive disclosures. Christopher May, the stadium’s general manager, took an even grander 27 per cent pay raise.

When bureaucrats chase away the anchor tenant and rely on millions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts, executives shouldn’t be taking home massive pay raises. British Columbia shouldn’t be rewarding bureaucratic failures.

A system where failure is rewarded with money made by taxing job creators and the productive class is a system that chases away investment.

Our provincial population shrunk by 51,000 British Columbians last year, according to population estimates in the provincial budget. More than 20,000 jobs were lost in B.C. in February alone.

The forestry sector, once the crown jewel of British Columbia’s economy, has seen 21 mill closures since 2023 and 15,000 forestry sector job losses since 2022. Industry experts cite “structural, made-in-B.C. problems,” leading to the job losses and mill closures.

That means there are fewer productive British Columbians paying for a bigger and more expensive government sector.

And make no mistake that the government sector has grown overall — not just with ministerial staffers. B.C. taxpayers employed 593,500 staff in the overall government sector as of April 1, 2025. One year later in the 2026 budget, the government claimed there are now “more than 598,000,” government workers. That’s an increase of 4,500 in just one year.

Eby promises his government working towards “right sizing,” the provincial bureaucracy but when you look at the numbers, that claim crumbles quicker than a sandcastle in the surf.

In total, the B.C. government committed to reducing the overall government sector by 15,000 jobs over the next three years, which “represents 3.4 per cent of the public sector workforce,” according to budget 2026. For context, the cost of the bureaucracy has increased by about five per cent in the past year alone, from $53.2 billion in 2025 to $55.7 billion this year.

Cutting only three per cent of government employees is not a solution to fix the bloated monster that has become B.C.’s bureaucracy. Rothbard warned that such a vast public service would acquire more instincts than simply running essential services.

“Government suffers no worries about losses or bankruptcy; it need serve no one except itself,” he wrote.

As the productive economy faces job losses and investment flight, taxpayers will be forced to cough up more and more money.

That’s money that the government is taking from families and businesses. It has real consequences.

About 113,000 British Columbians rely on food banks to put food on their table.

Meanwhile, B.C. bureaucrats received authorization to bill taxpayers for a $35,000 open bar reception in Victoria, 150 people attended including bureaucrats and their guests. Invoices included 46 glasses of sparkling wine, 10 shots of whisky, six shots of tequila and dozens of other beers, wines, spirits and cocktails.

Taxpayers are struggling. The bureaucratic class is billing us for champagne and tequila shots.

British Columbians need a real cut to the size of the bureaucracy. Every additional paper pusher in Victoria is one less worker in the productive economy.

And taxpayers can’t afford it any longer.

Carson Binda is the B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.