Bookmark Article
Donald Savoie, a Canadian public administration expert, critiques the disproportionate growth of policy-focused civil servants (“poets”) in Ottawa compared to service-delivering workers (“plumbers”). With federal employment rising from 340,000 in 2014 to 445,000 in 2025, he argues for a rebalancing towards local service delivery, highlighting that no western nation matches Canada’s concentration of public employees in its capital.
