Public sector productivity growth has fallen back to 2015 levels, despite its employment footprint and overall share of Canadian labour increasing significantly since then.
Public sector employees include those who work for federal, provincial or municipal government, for a government service or agency, a crown corporation, or a government-funded organisation such as a university or hospital, according to Statistics Canada. The statistics agency’s record of government sector labour productivity is measured across the same public sector jobs.
Between 2015 and 2023, Canada’s public sector employees grew by at least 722,700, or 20 percent, from 3.5 million to 4.2 million, with 2021 seeing the greatest annual increase of 291,800 public sector employees.
As a share of total employed, between 2015 and 2023 public sector employees increased from 19.7 percent to 21.1 percent.
During the same time, the government sector's labour productivity experienced miniscule growth before ultimately falling flat. In 2015, the ratio between real value added and hours worked was $58.2 per hour (chained 2017 dollars). Productivity rose to $59.5 per hour in 2020, before declining in 2023 back to its 2015 levels.
For comparison, between 2015 and 2023, all industries excluding those funded by the government saw their productivity average rise from $84 to $100 per hour.
As of September 9, the federal government will require all Treasury Board core public administration staff, over 282,000 workers, and some employees of other federal departments, to work in-office at least three days a week, up from two.

Several other federal agencies followed the Treasury Board’s encouragement “to ensure a coherent approach for the whole public service” by updating their own in-office work rules. They include the National Research Council of Canada, Parks Canada, the Communications Security Establishment, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Canada Revenue Agency.
One government employees union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), launched a petition against the new mandate in support of remote work. In April 2023, over 155,000 PSAC members held a strike opposing a requirement to work 40 to 60 percent of their hours in the office.