EDITORIAL: Federal bonuses a reward for failure

Since 2015, federal bonuses have cost taxpayers about $2 billion.

Published Jul 30, 2026  •  Last updated 15 minutes ago  •  2 minute read

Former parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux. Photo by Handout /Handout

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Most Canadians would consider a bonus from their employer a reward for excellent performance.

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Not so in the federal government, where it’s routine every year and often a reward for failure.

According to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, thousands of federal executives scooped up $201.5 million in bonuses last year, despite almost half of them failing to meet performance targets they basically set for themselves.

Almost nine in 10 receive an array of bonuses annually, everything from a “bilingual bonus” to “performance awards”, “performance pay”, “at risk pay” and more.

The amounts appear to be unrelated to the financial performance of where they work.

As reported by the CTF, Canada Post lost nearly $1.6 billion in 2025, took a $1 billion bailout from taxpayers, and yet rubber-stamped $30.8 million in bonuses.

VIA Rail, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year, handed out $10.3 million in bonuses. Every executive received a bonus averaging $115,293.

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Every staffer in the government’s Alto high-speed rail project received bonuses totalling $2.8 million, even though construction is years away and the route hasn’t been decided.

Since 2015, federal bonuses have cost taxpayers about $2 billion.

Testifying before the Senate committee on national finance in 2023, then parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux said the root problem is that the system for setting performance targets is broken.

“First of all, the targets in the department results reports are determined in large part by the public servants responsible for delivering the programs themselves. So assistant deputy ministers … approved by deputy ministers, approved by ministers. But in my experience, ministers are not very well equipped to challenge their own officials — neither is the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat … so we end up in a situation where it’s public servants who are responsible for delivering programs (who) set their own targets. And they usually set the bar not too high so that it doesn’t look too easy but neither too low. It’s fairly easy to achieve most of the time; yet, by their own assessment, they fail to deliver on many of these.”

As CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano said: “You shouldn’t get a bonus when you write the questions for your own test and still get a D-minus.”

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